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“Chapman is the Velvet Underground of Irish poetry and makes many poets twenty years his junior look like aspiring archbishops in comparison.”
– Kevin Higgins, reviewing Open Season on the Moon
Memory as unreliable narrator; the redemptive power of atheism; our relationship with oranges – these are among the subjects of this book, alongside personal responses to cultural touchstones: Leonard Cohen’s oft-quoted ‘Anthem’, Andres Serrano’s devotional Immersion (Piss Christ), and Yoko Ono’s orgasmic ‘Kiss Kiss Kiss’.
Patrick Chapman's first two collections, Jazztown (1991) and The New Pornography (1996), introduced a fearlessly original voice in modern Irish poetry. The Following Year, his tenth, reveals that voice anew, finding insight and compassion in remembrance and reflection.
Patrick Chapman has published ten volumes of poetry and five other books since 1991. He has also written audio dramas for Doctor Who and Dan Dare; an award-winning short film; and television for children. A founding editor of poetry magazine The Pickled Body, he lives in Dublin.
Darling
It is known
that a never-living child
will haunt the tenant not the house.
A spirit in the architraves,
you follow not my home
but me.
If I would go out
you could come too,
yet I never leave my room.
I expect
that you should like
to see a little of the world.
Lens
If you can recall every frame
in real time, in order;
can freeze any still, put it up
on the screen for inspection;
your life, that Cinerama epic,
may simply be too long.
It has taken you five decades
to watch all the dailies so far.
Is that a grey hair in the gate?
Who knows if the cigarette
burns mark your birthdays;
if the sound and vision have
always been in sync. Some kid
took the old projectionists out
the back and had them all shot.
Alien
How tender is the one who made the wasp
that pounces on the caterpillar, drills
into its body. Ovipositor
bites, the female Glyptapanteles lays
eighty eggs inside the victim. After
hatching, the larvae feed on the fluids
in the overtaken caterpillar
but do not attack its vital organs;
they must keep the incubator living
as through instars and exoskeletons
they mature. The bloated caterpillar,
when it is time to leave, they paralyse
with a chemical. Each larva gnaws its
own way out, stopping up the exit wound
with one final moulting, caterpillar
conscious of every rupture. In the space
of an hour, most of the larvae break free.
They gather in a mass to spin cocoons.
The puppet creature, its mind overcome
by sacrificial larvae left behind,
uses its own dying silk to produce
a protective cover for the pupae.
Their guardian now, the caterpillar
lashes out with its head at any threat
to its abusers. Rearing on hind legs
it swipes blindly at predators, not least
the hyperparasitoids who’d inject
their own eggs into Glyptapanteles.
The newborn wasps abandon their cocoons.
In time the caterpillar starves to death.
Remind me of how kind he is, the one
who made all that is made and even this,
the model of a normal family.
(All of the above poems are Copyright © Patrick Chapman, 2024)
