Robin Chapman

robin chapman & dogs

photo by Karen Updike

Robin's blog: http://robinchapmanspoemaday.blogspot.com/

New book of Robin's chaos poems and Clint's chaos art is described and can be ordered at
http://www.worldscibooks.com/chaos/5882.html
Robin Chapman & Julien Clinton Sprott, Images of a Complex World: The Art and Poetry of Chaos, Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co., 2005.

Robin Chapman's poetry collections include the books Learning to Talk (Fireweed Press) and The Way In (Tebot Bach Publishing), which won the Posner Poetry Award from the Council of Wisconsin Writers in 2000. Her chapbooks include Distance, Rate, Time and the poetry CD Banff Dreaming (both Fireweed Press), The Only Everglades in the World (Parallel Press), Arborvitae (Chickadee series, Juniper Press), and Once (with illustrations by Lynne Hume Burgess, Juniper Press, 2005). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The American Scholar, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, Poetry Daily and many other journals. "A Letter Home" appeared in The Christian Science Monitor's online The Face and Place of Poetry feature. Her work has been anthologized in J. Bosveld (ed.) Prayers to Protest, B. Goldberg (ed.) The First Yes, and B. Swann (ed.) Poetry Comes Up Where It Can, among others. She lives in Madison and has retired from studying child language development at the Waisman Center. She was heard on Poetry Buzz (WORT radio) in March, 2001. Tom Montag's appreciation of Robin's ONCE is posted on "The Middlewestern Bookshelf" at The Middlewesterner. You can view it at http://middlewesterner.typepad.com/, where it will be permanently archived.

 

PRAIRIE RESTORATION

One by one the prairie species come,
Fill every niche of time and light.
Their names spill into poems on the tongue,
Liatris, aster, needlegrass. We watch
The wash of Renoir's colors through
The bluestem grass, the herons sweeping
Home. In evening light the junipers
Could almost be bison, gently grazing.

 

IF CRICKETS DIDN'T SING

If crickets didn't sing
So loud, telling how warm
It is, you'd hear quieter things—
Flies landing, flick
Of the frog's tongue,
The heron stepping.

 

Both poems appeared in The Christian Science Monitor