The Dreamer Who Counted the Dead, Poems by Robin Chapman

The Dreamer Who Counted the Dead by Robin Chapman is a collection in which the political is intimately personal, and family and national history converge in startling ways. Consider “Fall-Out,” in which the speaker addresses her nuclear scientist father:

How many bombs to kill us all?
My sister calls him up,
So how many is it? she asks.
You’d be surprised how few, he says.
Just three thousand of the small ones;
three, of the thermonuclear.
In the news: our nuclear stockpile
Of ten thousand to be reduced.

In these poems, fallout pervades memory and experience, and establishes Chapman’s book as an unusually powerful one.

Wisconsin Library Association's 2008 Outstanding Achievement in Poetry Award

Sample Poems by Robin Chapman

“Blessed with a vexed affection for a nostalgic past, and a careful attention to the tendernesses and terrors of the present, in a world that threatens to fly apart, to succumb to loss and destruction, Robin Chapman embraces the redemptive power of language, the saving breath of words, ‘taking it all in, the seen and unseen, choosing what to keep.’ With a quiet lyricism, an affectionate intensity, these intimate poems ‘re-member’ the world in all its beautiful particularity—azalea and nudibranch, sassafras and lorikeet, tree fern and chickadee, all the things that ‘startle a tongue into speech.’ Whether evoking a bag lady in heaven, the death of a father, nuclear winter, a Sudanese mother, an Ice Princess, an aging Georgia O’Keeffe, these compelling poems are, at heart, meditations on time and eternity, and celebrations of love’s and the imagination’s efforts to find ‘what holds us together.’”—Ronald Wallace, Halls-Bascom Professor of English & Felix Pollak Professor of Poetry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, author of Long For This World (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003).

“Robin Chapman’s poems are brave and true, taking on the questions of science, art, religion, and our existence in the natural world. Her poems are full of the delights of body and as well as the weight of the soul. The Dreamer Who Counted the Dead is a wise and wonderful book.”—Jesse Lee Kercheval, author of Dog Angel, Director, Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing

Robin Chapman’s poetry collections include the books Learning to Talk (Fireweed Press), The Way In (Tebot Bach Publishing), and Images of a Complex World: The Art and Poetry of Chaos (World Scientific; with J.C. Sprott), the latter two both winners of the Posner Poetry Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. 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). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The American Scholar, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, Poetry Daily and many other journals.

ISBN 978-1933456584, 100 pages, $17.00

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