Today's poem is "Holding the emptiness softly"
from The Only Home We Know
Robin Chapman
's award-winning books of poetry include Six True Things, poems of growing up in the Manhattan Project town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and recipient of the Wisconsin Library Association's Outstanding Achievement in Poetry Award; THE WAY IN (Tebot Bach, 1999) and Images of a Complex World: The Art and Poetry of Chaos (with J.C. Sprott's fractals and explanations), recipients of the Posner Poetry Award; The Dreamer Who Counted the Dead, a WLA Outstanding Achievement in Poetry Award; and ABUNDANCE (Cider Press Review, 2009), recipient of Cider Press Editors' Book Award. She is Professor emerita of Communication Science and Disorders at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a member of the steering committee of the UW Chaos and Complex Systems Seminar. Her latest book is THE ONLY HOME WE KNEW (Tebot Bach, 2019).
Other poems by Robin Chapman in Verse Daily:
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About The Only Home We Know:
"In language luminous and true, with grace, good humor, generosity, and affectionate attention, Robin Chapman unflinchingly faces the local and global, even galactic disasters, that daily assail us. Casting a sober eye on the ills of our society, most of our own making—climate change, environmental degradation, inequality, bigotry, militarism—she refuses 'the beautiful poetry of grief' and instead affirms 'what heals, what carries us, through.' This inimitable book is ultimately a book of wonder and consolation, lovingly invoking the connectivity of the natural world—the only home we knowto reveal a wholeness at the heart of things. With, as she insists, 'the earth in its journey turning us again / toward the light. The text of good will arriving,' what can we do but embrace her joyful invitation to 'now, love, put on your clown nose / and dance with me under the wandering planets.'"
"The Only Home We Know is a book where memory functions as a spirit guide through the various details, wonders and terrors of our world. It is a book that takes a private hurt and makes it into a lyrical space where beauty is possible, is necessary. There is a tenderness and exuberance here that win me over, 'I'd mandate that every child at birth would be issued a drum,' the author says. Indeed. Bravo."
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February 18, 2017: "Midnight, and people I love are dying" "and I can't sleep so I'm up thinking..."
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..."
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