Shadow Box: Poems

Chappell, Fred

ISBN 10: 0807134538 / ISBN 13: 9780807134535

Published by LSU Press, Baton Rouge, 2009

About this Item

8vo. 81pages. Softcover in dark illustrated wrappers. The binding and the text block are wrinkled and creased. SIGNED by Fred Chappell on title page. Text is clean, but still a reading copy only.

Seller Inventory # 051511

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Shadow Box: Poems
• Publisher: LSU Press, Baton Rouge
• Publication Date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807134538
• ISBN 13: 9780807134535
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: First Edition First Printing
• Condition: Fair
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • North Carolina Literature
  • Poetry

About this title

Synopsis

In this sharply innovative collection, renowned poet Fred Chappell layers words and images to create a new and dramatic poetic form―the poem-within-a-poem. Like the shadow box in the volume’s title, each piece consists of an inner world contained, framed, supported by an outer―the two interdependent, sometimes supplementary, often contrary. For example, the grim but gorgeous “The Caretakers” is a landscape that reveals another image inside it. Chappell also introduces sonnets in which the sestet nests within the octet. Play serves as an important component, but the poems do not depend upon gamesmanship or verbal strategems. Instead, they delicately or wittily trace human feelings, respond somberly to the news of the world, and rejoice in humankind’s plentiful variety of attitudes and beliefs. Just as an x-ray can show the inner structure of a physical object, so the techniques in Shadow Box display the internal energies of the separate works.

With this new form―the “enclosed” or “embedded” or “inlaid” poem―Chappell broadens the expressive possibilities of formal poetry, intrigues the imagination in an entirely new way, and offers surprise and revelation in sudden flashes. At once revolutionary and traditional, Shadow Box contains an Aladdin’s trove of surprises.

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.