Winner of the Bollingen Prize in Poetry Together now, the four
poems River, Bloodfire, Wind Mountain, and Earthsleep counterpoint
one another in a grand symphony, Midquest. In what he has referred
to as "something like a verse novel," Fred Chappell has summoned up
the rich veins of memory and brings this to bear on the
contemporary sensibility. Through the remarkable range of his
poetic talent-in turns lyrical, dramatic, elegiac, mythic, and
humorous-Chappell brings us to the elemental: this encounter with
earth, air, fire, and water. The dynamic of their interrelation
contains multitudes but also holds a pattern. In his preface to the
completed work, Chappell explains that "though he is called 'Fred,
' the 'I' of the poem is no more myself than any character in any
novel I might choose to write. . . . He was constructed, as was
Dante's persona, Dante, in order to be widely representative."
Chappell's Fred has moved away from the land and the work of the
hands to the city and the work of the intellect. In the memories he
reviews at mid-life, he regains the values that he had thought were
lost. In its mental reclamation, Midquest belongs in a long and
vital southern tradition. In design, he tells us, its model was
"that elder American art form, the sampler, each form standing for
a different fancy stitch." Fred Chappell, author of four novels, is
professor of English at the University of North Carolina at
Greensboro. Besides the four volumes of Midquest, he has published
another collection of poems, The World Between the Eyes. Four times
he has won the Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry, and he has also
received the Prix de Meilleur, Acadmie Franaise, the Sir Walter
Raleigh Prize, and theNorth Carolina Award in Literature.
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