Patrick Chapman

Many of the poems in A Shopping Mall on Mars, Patrick Chapman's fourth collection, take a wry and satirical look at the dangerous new world in which we find ourselves, looking back with a certain nostalgia at the relative innocence of the nuclear age. Others offer compassionate yet unsparing insights into death, madness and childhood. A few speculate with science-fictional clarity on the kind of future we might be heading towards. This is work of the finest order from one of the most original Irish poets of the last two decades.