Family Gathering: Poems

by Fred Chappell

The occasion might be a holiday or a wedding, a christening or a funeral, and a family is gathered on the eve to eat, drink, talk, and cast eyes upon each other. Like all relations, the extended family in Fred Chappell’s Family Gathering has its foibles and strengths―oddballs and know-it-alls, hussies and historians, sparring spouses and model marriages. More than anything, this family loves gossip. Chappell portrays its members one and all in a series of sharply limned character sketches. In this crowd of strangers we may find personalities familiar, maybe too familiar. Perhaps we may even find a glimpse or two of ourselves.

Framed by the observations of Elizabeth, “age eight, / Priss-proud in her finery and bored / Bored bored,” the collection introduces ebullient Cousin Marjorie, self-satisfied Uncle Einar, evasive Cousin Lilias, cunning Aunt Wilma, aged Uncle Nahum, convivial Uncle Hobart, confusing Aunt Alicia―set down in poems terse, witty, sympathetic, thoughtful, and satiric. Cousin Elmer “tends the family tree, / Shaping it to topiary rare / And strange as he trims a little here and there / And lops some ugly branches drastically.” Cousin Lola “charts her paramours / On a performance scale from One to Ten / And then announces publicly the scores.” Uncle Brit “cuts you off before you say / Two sentences and lets you know / He knows already what you think / And what you think is pretty dumb.” And Aunt Agnes, ever forgiving, “recognizes what we are, / Yet holds us in affection / As steadfast as the morning star, / As if our faults had no connection / With the persons we are within.”

Although there is no continuous story line, the poems in Family Gathering almost amount to a piece of fiction. We leave these lines with full knowledge of the characters―their personalities, prejudices, idiosyncrasies, and intricate relationships with one another. Chappell gives us gossip, but also gossip parodied. If your family is like most, sparks of recognition will leap from every page. With results like those of the Polaroids taken by the family photographer, Chappell “makes us look as scary / As old woodcuts in a bestiary― / But maybe, after all, that’s us.”

Varied, humorous, and, above all, true, Family Gathering is pure mean fun.

Genres: Poetry, Epic Fantasy

62 pages, Paperback

First published November 5, 2000

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

[Camille McCarthy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some clever lines, but overall not my cup of tea.

[RAD · Rating 4 out of 5]

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

I recently purchased Fred Chappell’s Family Gathering for just $1.75 at Brand Spanking Used, a thrift shop in Fort Collins, Colorado. This copy is a former library book from Novato Library in Marin, California, that was checked out once on February 7, 2000 and later marked WITHDRAWN. It remains in very good condition, essentially untouched.

While I was very familiar with Chappell 30 years ago in my undergraduate days as an English major, I was not aware of this volume (published in 2000). I have a few of Chappell’s books on the shelves in my own library ( The Gaudy Place , Midquest , The World Between The Eyes , and a few others), but I’ve not read him in decades.

The cover of Family Gathering depicts an Audubon print of a flock of Carolina parrots, a species which became extinct in the early 20th century. The artwork depicts the brightly colored parrots eating poisonous cockleburs—an apt metaphor for the poems that follow.

Gathering is a collection of 50 poems, each describing members of an equally colorful extended family in a humorous way, with poisons of their own. The descriptions are faintly reminiscent of Chaucer’s character descriptions in The Canterbury Tales, with similar bawdy and garrulous aspects. Chappell does not employ Chaucer’s strict iambic pentamer rhyming couplets, opting for looser forms in a baroque or irregular way.

While formalism has been out of favor for some time, it demonstrates effort and craftsmanship on the part of the poet, providing a potentially deeper and more rewarding experience for the reader. The apparent care with which the cover art was chosen—a foreshadowing of the characters inside—provides a clue that Chappell is not just tossing out rhymes, but is crafting something deeper—even if only as a series of exercises, like Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.

“Elizabeth Retreats,” the introductory poem, consists of ten five-line stanzas in loose iambic pentameter with an a-b-c-d-b rhyme schema. I’m not aware of a specific extant structure that Chappell is following here, but the 50 lines seem deliberately related to books 50 poems, especially considering the symbolic foreshadowing of the cover’s Audubon print.

The second poem, “Uncle Einar,” is comprised of three stanzas of 13, 16, and 19 lines, respectively, with the first and last lines of each stanza rhyming, interspersed with at times roughly rhyming internal couplets.

“Uncle John” is three stanzas of octave canzonettas of a-b-a-b-c-d-c-d. “Aunt Wilma Describes Her Many Charms” follows this same form, but with six stanzas, as does “The Album” with four. “Genealogist” and “The Calculator” both have five quatrains in a-b-b-a. Later poems become more irregular while keeping formal characteristics.

With Family Gathering, Chappell explores a familiar topic (sometimes uncomfortably so, as with many holiday dinners) with humor, exploring form and other literary devices in an art-for-art’s-sake manner—poems for those who appreciate a poet’s poet.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this collection of character sketches, the poet pokes fun at, mocks, and/or defames each relative in mean and malicious ways, thereby presenting himself as the one person everybody hopes and prays does not attend any family gatherings: the writer who flays his own kin and serves up their raw flesh and blood for public consumption. (“We fear his secret fun may be to jeer / from smiling Olympus on us huddled masses here.” —from “It’s a Gift,” p. 52) The style—sometimes stretched, even tortured, on the rack of the rhyme scheme—seems to accentuate the jaundiced perspective of this album of petty Polaroids. That said, some of the poems offer a few glimpses of human foibles worth considering, particularly the depiction of dementia in “Aunt Felicia and the Facts of the Case.”


“And feel the better for it? No, not at all.
You feel you’ve been deceived in some dim way,
By some elusive seduction of your will.
You had to say the things you had to say
And now you wish you hadn’t. And ever shall.”
—“Listener,” p. 42


“Myself I won’t describe except
To say I hope to God
I don’t look anything like so odd,
With my eyes closed as if I slept

In deeply stupid consciousness.
She makes us look as scary
As old woodcuts in a bestiary—
But maybe, after all, that’s us.”
—“Photographer,” p. 47


“Is it true that he betrays
Those whom he is obliged
To love, if possible, to respect,
In any case?
and do they feel besieged,
Preferring cold neglect
To the ambivalent phrase
And unfair adjective
That slander the ways they live?”
—“The Traitor,” p. 55


Favorite Poems:
“Elizabeth Retreats”
“Uncle John”
“The Calculator”
“The Album”
“Cousin Marjorie”
“Adventures in Perception”
“Collusion”
“Nothing in Excess”
“Morris”
“The Long View”
“Glad Hand”
“Aunt Felicia and the Facts of the Case”
“Uncle Duncan”
“Small World”
“The Strain of Mercy”