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Source

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Fred Chappell, Source (Louisiana State U., 1985)

Fred Chappell has developed, over the course of his career, an amazing (even for a poet) ability to see, and to record what he sees in such a way that it is both poetic and understandable. In Source, Chappell's seventh book of poems, he may have reached the height of his ability to do so during the early period of his career. The poems here are for the most part short, imagist evocations of pictures the speaker can see; nothing more, nothing less, leaving the reader to come up with any deeper meaning (assuming one is necessary, which often it isn't). In other words, much of what is in Source is the very essence of poetry. For example,

An ancient wound troubles the river
Where the horses drink their reed-spiked shadows.
The perfumed barge drifts by, bearing
a final viceroy to oblivion....
("Source")

Good, solid, easy-to-picture image, and the reader is left to determine whether he's watching a funeral procession, a garbage scow, or an invented metaphor for the death of the Old South (or any of a number of other possible interpretations). This is exactly what poetry is supposed to do, what it should be; would that more poets, or those who consider themselves poets, would read Chappell and understand that this is the kind of thing they should strive for. ****