By Michelle Hines , University Relations
Fred Chappell.
Contact: (336) 334-5371
Posted 9-16-09
Fred Chappell, former N.C. Poet Laureate and professor emeritus of English at UNCG, has dealt in words for decades, authoring more than a dozen books of poetry, two short story collections and eight novels.
Yet Chappell still manages to innovate, as evidenced by his latest poetry collection, “Shadow Box,” Louisiana State University Press, 96 pages. Within his “Box,” he weaves poems into poems, echoes musical techniques and resurrects the Latin Christian hymn.
Chappell has in fact invented a fresh form, best described as “nesting” or “embedding.” Exploring such universal human themes as love, age, loss and memory, he embeds one poem within the framework or “box” of another.
Take, for example, Chappell’s poem “Fireflies”:
The children race now here by the ivied fence,
gather squealing now there by the lily border.
The evening calms the quickened air, immense
and warm; its veil is pierced with fire. The order
of space discloses as pair by pair porch lights
carve shadows. Cool phosphors flare when dark
permits yearning to signal where with spark
and pause and spark, the fireflies are, the sites
they spiral when they aspire, with carefree ardor
busy, to embrace a star that draws them thence.
Like children we stand and stare, watching the field
that twinkles where gold wisps fare to the end
of dusk, as the sudden sphere, ivory shield
aloft, of moon stands clear of the world’s far bend.
Chappell, born in Canton, N.C., taught at UNCG from 1964-2004. He has won numerous writing awards, including the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, the Aiken Taylor Award, the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry.
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Chappell’s wife of 50 years, Susan Nicholls Chappell, will join him to read from “Shadow Box” as part of UNCG’s Founders Day celebration Monday, Oct. 5. The reading begins at 4 p.m. in the Faculty Center on College Avenue.
The reading, free and open to the public, is sponsored by the UNCG Center for Creative Writing in the Arts. A book signing and reception will follow.
For more information, contact Mark Smith-Soto at mismiths@uncg.edu or (336) 334-5655.
