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. It’s great to see the other youngsters watching Mandy closely and learning from such a natural mother.Airplane Baby Banana Blanket by Benjamin Dodds, Recent Work Press 2020, was virtually launched by Stuart Barnes on 28th October 2020. Most importantly though, it’s bright eyed, alert and getting stronger by the day.Ī new arrival always creates a lot of excitement – it’s a real extended- family affair as many of the females in the group often want to help to take care of the newcomer while, for some of the juvenilles, seeing a mum with a new baby is a completely new experience. It’s a little too soon to tell if her new arrival is male or female as a newborn chimpanzee will remain in the arms of mum for several months until they develop the confidence to start exploring independently. She’s bonded instantly with her new baby and can be seen protectively cradling i t in her left arm at all times. New estimates suggest that as few as 18,000 Western chimpanzees remain in Africa and it’s the first subspecies of chimpanzee to be added to the list o f critically endangered apes.Īndy Lenihan, Team Man a ger of the Primates section at Chester Zoo, said: Primate experts at the zoo are yet to deter mine the sex of the new arrival but have declared the birth as a ‘hugely significant’ for the species.
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