Orion Magazine - September/October 2011

interesting accommodations, and blessed company, many of the chimpanzees here are not only supernaturally strong, but severely damaged and extremely dangerous. Some are plotting escape. And if they succeeded, they could easily kill sta=, volunteers, or other chimps.

But this book also gives us lovely moments of peace and portraits of infinite tenderness. Jethro, an enormous and powerful male, reaches out to a frightened, injured younger inmate and extends his hand to help. Annie, once part of a breeding program at a lab, “adopts” many of the traumatized chimps who arrive at Fauna, mediating disputes, calming tantrums, and teaching diplomacy. A former lab tech from the research lab comes to visit one of his former charges, Pepper, who has been relocated to Fauna. She’s high in a tree when he first arrives — but when she sees her human friend, she climbs down in a flash, smooshes her lips through the bars, and kisses him. The lab tech breaks into tears. He knows Pepper has every right to hate him, yet she remembers only his kindness. Westoll writes movingly about these scenes, with an eye for vivid detail and the instinct of a gifted storyteller.

Despite the unethical and unfathomable cruelty they su=er, today in the United States a thousand chimpanzees are incarcerated in six biomedical research labs, in large part funded with our taxes. Ours is the last developed country in the world to continue to perform invasive biomedical research on chimpanzees. The proposed Great Ape Protection Act would change that. To promote its passage is one of the main reasons Westoll wrote this book. The other is to share the gift of the rescued chimps’ courage and example: that “no matter what kind of trauma we’ve been through, we all have the capacity to recover and to help others heal.”

— Sy Montgomery

Radial Symmetry

BY KATHERINE LARSON
Yale University Press, 2011. $18, 96 pages.

foR kATHERInE lARSon, science is a lover she embraces and betrays. The poems in her first collection, chosen by Louise Glück for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, remind me how necessary poems are to expose the beauty and riddle of our humanity. Larson elides the lyric’s sensual im-pulsivity with biology’s reasoned patience. There is in her poems no division between these habits of mind that we’ve come to think of as disciplines. In “Love at Thirty-Two Degrees,” the poet is not content with dissection on the lab bench as a means to understand the body of a squid:

After class,
I stole one from the formaldehyde
and watched it bloom in my bath-
room sink
between the cubes of ice.

This is a narrative detail, but story is not the
point of the poem. Rather, the poet lives in-
side the paradox of her desire to see reality
unimpeded—a desire that requires her to
learn and unlearn again and again, and to
head o= driving into the night “with a ther-
mos full of silver tequila.” I love a poet who
is so capable at recasting eros as a hunger
for experience. “Science— // beyond
pheromones, hormones, aesthetics of
bone, / every time I make love for love’s
sake alone, // I betray you.”
Aptly, the book’s cover is graced with
illustrations from the nineteenth-century
polymath Ernst Haeckel. He was a man
whose appetite to understand the riddle
of the universe required study in biology,
philosophy, and aesthetics. There’s no
solving such a complex riddle, of course,
but to extend the mind’s reach as far
as possible into the mystery is one of
our most endearing human traits. For
Haeckel, as for Larson, to apprehend the
nature of reality requires aesthetic ges-
ture, the artful and shaping
engagement of the mind
with what it experiences.
And Larson’s work is brac-
ingly artful in its range of
formal gestures, tension
between line and sentence,
and syntactical freedom
that creates a music that
hastens and halts, not un-
like what happens when a
dissonant note is hit in a
musical composition, mak-
ing one hungry for a resolution.

I’m sick
of this stubbornness
but the earthworms
seem to think it all right
they move forward
and let the world pass
through them they eat
and eat at it, content to connect
everything through
the individual links
of their purple bodies to stay
one place would be death.

Paul Klee, Aristotle, Agassiz, Darwin, Bécquer, Rousseau, Euclid, and Akhmatova are among the intellectual talismans in her work. Her poetic imagination provides a gallery space in which biology, aesthetics, and metaphysics meet. While ideas and allusions nourish this work, they do not boast from pedestals, nor do they cause it to become doctrinaire. Rather, the poet works as nature does at reassembling herself from the materials at hand.