E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

A LADY LOOKING FOR NOSFERATU IN CHAPMAN'S POETRY I have been a fan of Patrick Chapman's poetry for the whole of the 21st century at least, and remember first coming across his unusual work in his book The New Pornography (1996) - which was at the time a radical departure for Irish poetry - and 20 years later still seems to be.  Chapman should be celebrated as one of the most idiosyncratic, strange, disturbing, and imaginative Irish writers now at work - and his gothic, atheistic, scientific sensibilities chime equally with Stoker 's and Cronenberg 's. We often forget the Romantics loved science and the bizarre, and mistrusted god, and are more modern than even we sometimes appear to be.  Chapman is that sort of Romantic poet. His new collection is his best by far.  Slow Clocks of Decay (Salmon, 2016) has much that appeals to that part of me which loves Hitchcock films and sexy vampires; that enjoys bleak descriptions of life's futility, and the doomed nosta...

Jessica Mayhew reviews A Promiscuity of Spines   by Patrick Chapman Newly arrived in London, I was struck by the constant chatter that stole through the previous occupant’s grey curtains and into my room. Lovers’ tiffs, actual tiffs, drunken revellers tossed from the night buses, all punctuated by the call-to-prayer. Reading ‘Night on 109 th Street’ by Irish poet Patrick Chapman, I was gripped by his keen observation of the enforced intimacies of city life. “Forbidden to smoke in the apartment,” the speaker of the poem sits on the roof and watches aeroplanes and fire hydrants, and all the debris of the streets. However, the speaker’s attention soon switches, until he is spying on the neighbours. The activities begin seemingly innocent; the reader hears the “sudden creak of cello” or a football game, but curiosity soon uncovers a driver asking a girl “Baby, how much for a suck?” This penetration of privacy continues, and the speaker watches: A man in an adja...

The Monsters Under The Bed: Doctor Who Series Five So Far by Patrick Chapman According to Steven Moffat , its new showrunner, Doctor Who isn’t set in outer space, it’s set under your bed. That’s where the monsters are. At least it is if you’re eight. And that age group has always been the show’s core audience. The difference is now that the core audience includes girls. Moffat’s earlier episodes for the show always had a young girl at the heart of the mystery, except Blink, which was adapted from a short story which had. Back in the mists of time, one reviewer called Doctor Who ‘the children’s own programme which adults adore.’ There’s probably never been a truer description of the show, and never has that description been truer than today, as the series, now established in its fifth run of the revival, or the thirty-first overall, shows itself to be a true modern fairytale. In Moffat, it has a lead writer who knows about children and how to deliver the safe scares for which the...

Space. The New Frontier. JJ Abrams’s new Star Trek film opened recently to spectacular business and critical acclaim. It’s the first time Trek has intersected with the mainstream since the movie First Contact in 1996 but to do so, it had to reinvent itself. This is not the first time that Star Trek has become new. Over the decades, it’s started again several times, to varying degrees of commercial and artistic success. Often, its creative rebirth has been at the hands of outsiders, fresh perspectives bringing new ideas. Let’s go back to the beginning of the final frontier and have a look at those incarnations, bearing in mind that every generation gets the Star Trek it deserves. Or, to put it more positively, Trek does well not just when it’s in touch with the times, but also when it coincides with moments of optimism. Forty-five years ago a former motorcycle cop and fighter pilot, Gene Roddenberry , tried to sell NBC on a show he described as ‘Wagon Train to the Stars.’ As pitch...

The Thousand Dreams of JG Ballard The 'Sage of Shepperton', JG Ballard , died on Sunday at the age of 78 after a long illness. His last published book, Miracles of Life , was a deeply moving memoir in which he reviewed aspects of his life from the vantage point of old age. It was a fascinating insight into the mind of this genius of the suburbs, who created a fictional world so complete and immersive, one was often tempted to just move there and be done with it. However, it might be said that everything you needed to know about Ballard could already be found not in a memoir but in his novels and stories. From the heartbreaking beauty of an early tale, 'The Garden of Time', to the shattered realities of the none-more-avant-garde 'condensed novels' of The Atrocity Exhibition , Ballard's world was constructed out of his experiences as a boy in wartime Shanghai, as well as his engagement - shaped by those experiences - with the post-war world he found dull yet f...