Robin Chapman is a poet and developmental psycholinguist who grew up in the Manhattan Project town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. She is the author of ten books of poetry, including the Posner Poetry Award-winning books Ihe Way In and Images of a Complex World: Ihe Art and Poetry of Chaos (with J.C. Sprott's explanations and fractals). Her book Ihe Dreamer Who Counted the Dead received a Wisconsin Library Association Outstanding Poetry Book of the Year Award, and her book Abundance received the Cider Press Editors' Book Award. Dappled Things (Revue K) is a portfolio of 23 poems accompanying Peter Miller's photogravures. the eelgrass meadow and One Hundred White Pelicans (Tebot Bach), poems of climate change, are her most recent books. She has also co-edited the anthologies On Retirement (University ofiowa Press) and Love Over 60: An Anthology of Women's Poems (Mayapple Press). Her poems have appeared in Ihe American Scholar, Ihe Hudson Review, Ihe Iowa Review, OnEarth, and Wilderness among many other journals; and on American Life in Poetry, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Writers' Almanac. She is recipient of the 2010 Appalachia Poetry Prize. Retired from teaching and research in children's language development and disorders in the Dept. of Communication and Communicative Disorders at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Waisman Center, she lives with her husband Will Zarwell in Madison and helps organize UW's Chaos and Complex Systems Seminar. She posts her watercolors, and other poets' poems, on Robin Chapman's Poem a Day Blog and teaches poetry workshops at The Clearing and Bjorklunden in Door County.

Other poems by Robin Chapman in Verse Daily:
July 27, 2014:   "Emptying Out" "Let rue be like the river that pours through..."
November 30, 2011:   "Cassandra Looks at Dark Matter Through Hubble's Eye" "Winter again, and all that futile calling out..."
February 1, 2009:   "Dailiness" "It is the birds..."

Books by Robin Chapman:

Other poems on the web by Robin Chapman:
"Time"
Five poems
Two poems
Two poems
Six poems
Two poems
Five poems
"Mapping The Marquette County Hill"
"Enough"
"Vacations"
Two poems

About Six True Things:

"Robin Chapman's poems work by contrast, opposition and paradox, but it takes a while for the reader to notice, because the breaches and conflicts are warmly depicted, with green always on the edges. Thus she presents her childhood in the 'atomic city' of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and cemesto housing designed by Army Engineers flanked by blackberries, plums, and green apple trees; her father was a physicist (inspiring her life-long love of science) but left her family; math was a 'starburst discovery,' but she turned to the life sciences. Ivan Dostoevsky's question about the sufferng of small children is answered again and again by kittens and dogs, butter and cream, friends and teachers, and our visitors from the wild: chiomunks, sparrows, mice, possum. So we follow her into adulthood and the present laced with the past, where Darwin's competition comes to seem so much less pressing and important than the 'chain reaction' of biological, and human, co-operation. The light from Sputnik, on its way to the edge of the universe, falls backwards on boys and girls parked on the outskirts of town, by the river's edge, under the green apple trees, kissing."
—Emily Grosholz