Lucy ‘oes not know // can exist / Is unaware // she’s one herself’ ‘et it out Get It // Out she shrieks in sound / and sign’ (‘One-Off’). To her, he’s a ‘conspirator-intruder’, an ‘inhuman thing’ (‘A Change of Scenery’). Pre-Baboon Island, Lucy encounters only one other chimp, a sexually mature male, at her childhood home. On days meant as / weaning isolation, she / beams ASL through bars / at a blankly turned back. I’m still really affected by Ben’s writing about this period-from the poem ‘Stuck’-‘ wants / cup and glass, gin / if she can get it / not the flat river lap / at the island’s skirt. Lucy flies over the Atlantic with her parents.’ The dazzling anaphora continues-here’s the poem’s final complete sentence-‘Lucy flies over the Atlantic with her parents and their paid academic friend on her way to Abuko Reserve in the Gambia (instead of a zoo or a medical lab, two other considered options), not yet knowing she’s left her childhood home and life behind for good as she’s drugged with phencyclidine, sealed inside a crate.’įor a time, Lucy lives on the Gambia’s Baboon Island with ‘provider-protector’ Janis Carter (‘Lucy Lives’), a University of Oklahoma grad student, & eight other chimps. In Airplane Baby Banana Blanket, sorrow & hope, terror & tenderness, trauma & healing often coexist. He excitedly unearths, as Lucy excitedly unearths a plant (‘Running Away’), the games she likes to play, her sexuality & attraction to human males, her nocturnal ‘queer racket’ (‘Intrusion’) & ‘chaos and din’ (‘Warm Welcome’), her relationships with her adoptive family & other humans, & her responses to Maurice’s experiments. Ben’s language, technique & verve are captivating. Lucy also learns American Sign Language-over one hundred and forty signs & phrases. She learns to cook, to mix drinks (she favours gin & tonic) & to sit at the family dinner table. She sleeps in a crib, is toilet trained to a degree, has ‘papers / and Golden Books’ (‘Playgirl’), a pet cat & ‘a Woolfian / room of her own’ (‘Renovations’). Lucy is raised in their home as if she were their human daughter-or, as Ben writes, ‘ sometimes-subject / daughter’ (‘Playgirl’). Maurice is a psychotherapist & an academic at the university, Jane a social worker. Some of Regulator’s themes-family, coming of age, sexuality, animals, the natural world, science, space-are present in Airplane Baby Banana Blanket, a poetic biography of ‘amber eye’ Lucy (‘One-Off’), a chimpanzee born in 1966 in Florida, stolen from her phencyclidine-drugged mother, then adopted through the University of Oklahoma’s Institute for Primate Studies by Maurice & Jane Temerlin. Soon after, Ben & I started emailing each other & quickly became friends.Ī few years later Ben’s terrific debut collection Regulator was published. What still echoes most emphatically about that writing is its wit, inventiveness & economy of language. I first read Ben’s poetry about ten years ago, in Mascara Literary Review. I’m thrilled to be launching Ben’s intriguingly-titled second poetry collection. Before we begin I’d like to acknowledge the Darumbal people, the traditional custodians of the land I’m zooming from, & pay my respects to Elders past, present & emerging. Welcome to the launch of Benjamin Dodds’s Airplane Baby Banana Blanket. Airplane Baby Banana Blanket by Benjamin Dodds, Recent Work Press 2020, was virtually launched by Stuart Barnes on 28th October 2020.
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