Six True Things. This item is unavailable.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, Advisory Editor, The Hudson Review; Liberal Arts Research Professor of Philosophy, English, and African American Studies, Pennsylvania State University; poet.