BOOKS
495
Surplus Intelligence?
THE PASSIONATE MIND: SOURCES OF DESTRUCTION AND CREATTVITY.
By Robin Fox. Foreword by Ashley Montagu. Transaction Publishers.
$24·95·
IF
DARWIN HAD DECIDED
to
follow up
The Descent of Man
with a vol–
ume of Petrarchan sonnets describing sexual selection, or if Sir James
George Frazer had paused between volumes twelve and thirteen of
The
Golden Bough
to
deliver some free-verse effusions on the incest taboo,
we would have a tradition against which to consider this volume. Dar–
win and Frazer, if they felt such impulses, wisely desisted. Robin Fox
(born in
1934)
has not.
An anthropologist best known for tough-minded books on the bio–
logical substrata of human society, Fox has written poems and dialogues
throughout his professional career.
The Passionate Mind
revises and
expands his earlier volume,
The Violent Imagination
(1989),
adding,
among other things, his juvenilia and a handful of poems in French.
Many of the individual pieces-"The Fool Sings of His Skull and Its
Content," "He Apologizes
to
Her for Comparing Her Eyes to the Wings
of Captive Hummingbirds Used in Navaho Rituals"-display the
author's anthropological learning, but the pieces also gather
to
a larger
evolutionary theme, the idea of "surplus" intelligence. In "Evolutionary
Poetics," Fox writes:
(Continuing the theme of consciousness
out of context but reflecting on
its wobbly route
to
this plateau herewith
reflections on the crucial stages of
hominid history Thus each stage produced
a curious "surplus" which somehow became
the basis accidentally for the next
Poetry of this order would not ordinarily merit a review, and I see no
reason
to
be uncharitable
to
a distinguished scholar who has, perhaps
unfortunately, chosen to indulge his avocation in public. Here and there
in
The Passionate Mind,
Fox hits an apt metaphor. Mostly, though, he
misses. In "Three Possibilities," for example, he writes: "There are those
women who inspire lust / For some small reason like the way a dress /
Clings
to
a limb the mouth pulsates tbe eye / Droops slightly." Compare
