Fred Chappell was born in 1936 and passed away just days into 2024. He was a child of the Smoky Mountains in western North Carolina, of their hardscrabble farms and mill towns. Hurricane Helene would devastate Chappell’s homeland a few months after his death. The scope of this devastation would have likely surprised even Chappell, who was well-versed in his region’s tragedies (floods recur in his poems and fiction) and who had spent a lifetime pondering the fleetingness and perishability of this world’s goods.
Chappell was an accomplished novelist, but the lyricism of novels like I Am One of You Forever and his achievement in verse make it unsurprising that, as John Lang holds, he gave “his primary allegiance to poetry.” In 1981, he published Midquest, an epic sequence of poetry or, more precisely, an omnibus collection fusing four previously published collections into what Chappell called a “single long poem.” It helped win him the Bollingen Prize and deserves to be much better known today. Like most of his writings, Midquest is set in North Carolina, in the Appalachian Mountains and in Durham, where Chappell attended college at Duke. As the title suggests, it is Chappell’s midlife reflection on his childhood home, his family, his life to date. The title also suggests the mythic dimension of the volume, further underscored by how its four main sections are thematized by the four classical elements: “River,” “Bloodfire,” “Wind Mountain,” “Earthsleep.” He writes early on,
Multiplying my age by 2 in my head,
I’m a grandfather. Or dead.
“Midway in this life I came to a darksome wood.”
But Dante, however befuddled, was Good.
Chappell thus situates the volume in his own life via the most famous of “midquests,” Dante’s Divine Comedy, a pervasive influence on Chappell’s volume.
A bookish child, the son of teachers, Chappell read voraciously, especially in the adventurous, mythical, mystical, symbolic, and strange. He immersed himself in dime store pulps, so his writings are shaped not only by the highbrow Dante but also by popular fantasy, science fiction, and horror. We see their explicit influence early, in his 1968 novel Dagon, which borrows from the Cthulhu mythos of H. P. Lovecraft, and in 1984’s long fantasy poem Castle Tzingal. We also see their explicit influence late, when the celebrated writer descended from the rarified world of literary prizes and again began publishing in the weird-fiction magazines of his youth. In 2016, Chappell published the fantasy novel A Shadow All of Light with Tor Books. Jesse Graves writes, “Chappell is surely the only writer to receive both the World Fantasy Award for fiction (1994), and Yale University’s Bollingen Prize in Poetry (1985). . . . Chappell reached across worlds that others have not bridged, writing in the horror, science fiction, and fantasy genres, alongside his erudite literary poems and fiction.” We see the subtler influence of pulp fiction and speculative literature throughout his body of work. Images and motifs of the uncanny, the whimsical, and the eldritch run throughout Midquest, for instance, making these poems of Appalachia feel even more epic and expansive.
Ever After, published in 2024, is a posthumous collection of some of Chappell’s final poems. Many of these late life poems are again set in rural North Carolina, and, as the fairy tale title suggests, they are just as pervaded by the uncanny and the whimsical (and occasionally the eldritch). But Ever After is not an epic quest. Its poems are all less than a page in length. Some are only a few lines long. The title of the first poem suggests what we can expect from the collection: “A Smaller Night Music.” And this is mostly what we get: a smaller, subtler, at times even delicate music of life’s late twilight, of descending night.
Many of these late poems, unsurprisingly, have to do with aging, loss, loneliness, and death. Several poems cherish his marriage to his wife Susan and rue the approaching end of their long life together. In “Effigy,” memory does not console but instead “returns as mockery”: “These remembered flames now burn afresh / to embrace your spirit, subliming it to ash.” In “Release,” the speaker reflects on an old lover named Ramona who has undoubtedly forgotten him. “If only you could forget yourself yourself,” the poem ends. This line is leavened with Chappell’s mischievous wit, but it is still heavy stuff.
Another recurring theme is how we attempt to bring order and beauty to an often-unsettling reality. We might do this by maintaining relationships or through ritualized routines, Chappell suggests, and we of course might do it through writing poems. “Prospect” begins with a drab view of the “dingy mill village” from the poet’s writing desk and ends,
The aggressive page with his few spider-scribbles
expands to the size of a glacier,
an immense white rose petal,
eager to receive some purpose for existence.
The poem becomes a way to find, or to assert, or to insist upon some meaning amidst the perplexities of life. Indeed, the poet deeply needs to find (to create?) such solace on the page. Chappell knew his philosophy too. The poem’s sensibility calls to mind Nietzsche or Santayana and their respective theories of aesthetic value asserted over against a chaotic, amoral nature.
But then again, it is not the menacingly inscrutable world alone, unmediated, that pressures the poet to find consoling meaning on the page. This pressure also comes from the poet’s own dark propensity to “speculate.” The poem is riven by the question, “When must the universe devour itself?” Its title is “Prospect,” and we are ultimately dealing with only one prospect, one possibility, here. Chappell, as Lang points out, is a poet of doubleness, of unresolved “dialectics and paradoxes.” And indeed, Chappell gives a companion poem twenty pages later in the volume, “Perspective.” Reflecting on the same (but of course different, since it is a different day) scene from his writing desk, which now appears to him as “sociable” rather than “mute,” the poet “tries to imagine anew / the inner workings of the outer world.” Now, the new question at the heart of the poem is “What does the universe contain besides itself?” On this day, in this poem, there seems to be some undevourable remainder in his devouring world.
Transcendence flashes through some of Chappell’s poems, while it is conspicuously absent from others. These unexplained changes in perspective suggest a meaning that hovers between each poem and its double. What is the ideal that we sometimes glimpse within the world and which thus inspires our own attempts at order-making, at meaning-making? Why is it not always present? We see how transcendence tantalizes in one of the best poems in this collection, “Upon Reflection,” where a placid lake “overfills with images” so that “it is a world clothing itself with another world, / as a woman pulls on a kimono painted with springtime.” Erōs, in its famous description in Plato’s Symposium, is always between a world of absence and a world of fulfillment. The poem ends,
The lake depicts our world cleansed of its uproar
to demonstrate a holier state of being,
peaceful and contemplative, immune to time,
one further paradise closed to humankind.
The lake is an image for what one kind of poem can do. It can offer a frozen beauty, elevated out of the flux of time. “Upon Reflection” is a kind of ars poetica in this regard. But it is also about a lake, about the beauty of the world, a beauty which can at times seem unworldly, as this poem’s Platonic intimations suggest.
So this is a collection of profound loss but also of a beauty deepened at twilight. The mood of these poems modulates like sunlight and shadow playing across an Appalachian ridge, even if the prevailing palette is the smoky blues of bittersweet. To my mind, few writers have as compellingly ranged from the horrific to the graciously affirming as Chappell (or blended them, as he did in his excellent Kirkland family novels). It is an odd bird that might plausibly appeal both to fans of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror and of Wendell Berry’s communitarianism, to literary prize committees and readers of pulp fiction, to both atheists and believers. “Old Fred,” as he has often been called and called himself, flies free of any of these perches. His is a peculiar vision, but in the end it is so compelling, to me at least, because its mythic and fairy tale trappings, its nods to weird fiction and revered classics, are not escapist. Chappell defends the poetic imagination at its most fanciful, but he also helps us see that our world is strange in its just mysteriously being there, in how it is always revealing different facets of itself, terrifying and beautiful.
Chappell also reminds us of our own strangeness as imaginative, meaning-seeking creatures gifted with existence and cursed by time. In the poem “Interval,” the goddess Psychē (soul) blows beautiful soap bubbles that shimmer in “graceful frolic, silent, debonair,” while the god Chronos (time) blows “misshapen” bubbles from a pipe that “is carved of human bone.” Chapell sounds like an unbeliever at times, at other times an irreverent Dionysian joker. (The sonnet “Stairway to Heaven” ends, “Do not despair. Reach toward the light divine. / In yonder cupboard stands a jug of wine.”) At other times, though perhaps less often in this collection than in others, he sounds like a Dantean pilgrim, a monk of the mountains, still reverent even if he’s left behind what he calls in the poem “Departure” a “Sunday School divinity.” What remains constant throughout his poetry’s Heraclitean flux is a deep sense of mystery.
How does this collection rate in Chappell’s substantial body of work? I don’t think that any of the poems in Ever After are among his very best. If you haven’t read them, you should check out earlier gems such as “My Grandmother Washes Her Feet,” “Narcissus and Echo,” “Scarecrow Colloquy,” and “Fireflies.” A small few of the poems in Ever After read like unpolished fragments or late drafts that aren’t quite there yet. They have infelicities or sputtering conclusions. That said, Chappell aficionados will find much that delights in this posthumous volume. Moreover, whatever its flaws, the sustained and ever-shifting “night music” of this collection exceeds its memorable passages. It casts a cumulative spell, and with its many companion poems and its thematic refrains, the collection as a whole feels more finished than some of the poems within it. This music is one major reason why a reader new to Chappell might start with Ever After rather than going straight to Midquest.
Ever After is also interesting in terms of form. Despite often writing in (loose) meter and rhyme, Chappell is rarely talked about in formalist circles. He deserves to be better known in general, but especially among poets who write in form. Ever After helps make this case. Many of its poems are sonnets. There are striking passages of verse throughout, such as these two lines of iambic pentameter in the opening poem,
And now the night arrives and flows into
the shadow of the tree and draws it forth.
These lines convey much about this collection, the beauty of shape and shadow, the bittersweet music of descending night.
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