Source: Poems

by Fred Chappell

In a noteworthy career Fred Chappell has created a body of verse that will likely endure as long as the North Carolina mountains that are the setting of so many of his poems. In such works as the tetralogy Midquest and the long poem Castle Tzingal, Chappell has shown himself to be a master of his craft―acutely inquisitive and keenly observant, adept at a variety of forms and styles. Earlier this year Chappell’s poetic achievement was honored when he received the Bollingen Prize in Poetry. With Source, his newest collection, Chappell again reveals himself as a mature and gifted poet writing at the peak of his powers.

The poems in Source show the breadth and diversity of Chappell’s range. They are by turn soft and lyrical, elegiac and formal, speculative and experimental. They draw on mythic images of the past and horrific visions of the future, but most important, they reflect Chappell’s southern roots and his knowledge of a simple people and a simple way of life, as seen in these lines from “Humility”:

In the necessary field among the round
Warm stones we bend to our gleaning.
The brown earth gives in to our hands, and straw
By straw burns red aslant the vesper light.
The village behind the graveyard tolls softly,
begins
To glow with new-laid fires. . . .

. . .
This is the country we return to when
For a moment we forget ourselves,
When we watch the sleeping kitten quiver
After long play, or rain comes down warm.
Here we might choose to live always, here where
Ugly rumors of ourselves do not reach,
Where in the whisper-light of the kerosene lamp
The deep Bible lies open like a turned-down bed.

Genres: Poetry

57 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Fred Davis Chappell retired after 40 years as an English professor at University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He was the Poet Laureate of North Carolina from 1997-2002. He attended Duke University.

His 1968 novel Dagon, which was named the Best Foreign Book of the Year by the Academie Française, is a recasting of a Cthulhu Mythos horror story as a psychologically realistic Southern Gothic.

His literary awards include the Prix de Meilleur des Livres Etrangers, the Bollingen Prize, and the T. S. Eliot Prize.

Reviews

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fred Chappell, Source (Louisiana State U., 1985)

Fred Chappell has developed, over the course of his career, an amazing (even for a poet) ability to see, and to record what he sees in such a way that it is both poetic and understandable. In Source, Chappell's seventh book of poems, he may have reached the height of his ability to do so during the early period of his career. The poems here are for the most part short, imagist evocations of pictures the speaker can see; nothing more, nothing less, leaving the reader to come up with any deeper meaning (assuming one is necessary, which often it isn't). In other words, much of what is in Source is the very essence of poetry. For example,

An ancient wound troubles the river
Where the horses drink their reed-spiked shadows.
The perfumed barge drifts by, bearing
a final viceroy to oblivion....
("Source")

Good, solid, easy-to-picture image, and the reader is left to determine whether he's watching a funeral procession, a garbage scow, or an invented metaphor for the death of the Old South (or any of a number of other possible interpretations). This is exactly what poetry is supposed to do, what it should be; would that more poets, or those who consider themselves poets, would read Chappell and understand that this is the kind of thing they should strive for. ****

[Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very mythical. Creating his own mythology in North Carolina. I lost my patience with some of the poems, but even then I couldn't ignore the beautiful images and the stark concrete details. Not to shabby.

[Lesley Looper · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the imagery of this collection of Chappell's poems! I was especially struck by the sounds that some of the poems elicited, especially the ones about music. My favorites in this collection were "The Story" and "Narcissus and Echo."