Source

by Fred Chappell, Unknown Author

Book by Chappell, Fred

Genres: Poetry

Hardcover

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."