Source: Poems - Softcover

Chappell, Fred

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807112771 ISBN 13: 9780807112779

Publisher: LSU Press, 1985

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Before his death in 2024, Fred Chappell published more than thirty volumes of poetry and prose. Honors bestowed on his work include the Bollingen Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the Thomas Wolfe Prize. His fiction was translated into more than a dozen languages and received the Best Foreign Book Award from the Académie Française. A native of Canton in the mountains of western North Carolina, Chappell was the state’s poet laureate from 1997 to 2002 and an English professor at the University of North Carolina–Greensboro for forty years.

Edition details

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Publication date: 1985
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807112771
• ISBN 13: 9780807112779
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 57