There are passages, even whole poems in Fred Chappell’s new collection for which there are clearly precedents in, or one might say kinships to, the work of other poets. The urbane chattiness of “Subject Matter,” for instance, makes no bones about it.

It is nice to imagine how

Auden would open

a poem about the Farbenlehre

with a genial phrase:

“The mistaken Faust put

down his prism . . . “

—something like that, but defter;

would find an ism

rhyme pleasant and refreshing,

and with polished ease

would set the situation,

drop in

an intriguing fact or two,

keeping in mind his aim

to civilize our

anxious century.

There are other notes and timbres, though. “Bee” recalls the elegiac John Crowe Ransom. “The Garden” is redolent of Wallace Stevens in its elegantly meditative whimsicality. There are traces—there always have been—of Allen Tate, and there are other voices, too, some of which I may have missed. One can take notice of such gestures, admire their parlor-trick dexterity, and leave it at that. But I think that would be to miss part of the point of Chappell’s extraordinary new volume.

Bemused imitation, more or less helpless, is predictable behavior in a promising novice. Indeed, that’s mostly how a novice learns the tricks of his trade as, by trial and error, he discovers his own character and voice. Chappell, however, is an accomplished master. There can’t be a dozen poets now writing in English to compare with him for technical facility, breadth of culture, and emotional range. If Fred Chappell is playing around this way, it must be serious play. Surely, whatever he does, he does now not merely on impulse but with deliberation.

These performances in various keys, these nods, friendly, pious, or polite, in the direction of various literary forebears serve to extend the range of Chappell’s established voice, to insist on the richness of the choices he faces among competing cultural and stylistic possibilities of life in America, of his life in North Carolina at the close of the millennium. He signs himself, as he always has, ever since The World Between the Eyes, as a man of the country, a man whose diction can sometimes verge on back-roads quaintness (“to olden,” meaning “to age,” is not a verb many contemporary poets have used). He is proud to show that he comes from farming people. The assertion, then, in these poems—as natural to them as breathing or laughter—of cosmopolitan high culture is no mere embellishment but a part of their purpose, an aesthetic and even political comment that seems to me to conform to Tate’s model and that of the other Fugitives. Their ideal was a kind of cultural Cincinnatus, the amateur, the man of the country whose connection with learning, in no way trendy, was the very opposite of what the city slickers banter about at their cocktail parties. If a man’s house is his castle, it can also be his university and his club.

The bookishness of this book arises, I should imagine, from Chappell’s realization that city dwellers tend to be overstimulated and therefore deprived of the tranquility that is an important part of intellectual life. One must have time to read and to reread, which used to be all there was to do before those dish antennas started sprouting up among the outbuildings of farms. Chappell’s title. First and Last Words, refers to his nine prologue and nine epilogue poems, all of which are meditations either on texts (Job, the Oresteia, Beowulf, The Wind in the Willows, or the Constitution of the United States) or writers (Goethe, Tolstoy, Tacitus, Livy, Einstein, Kant). He is claiming these books and writers, as well as explaining and commenting upon them—as one might explain and comment on the lives of interesting neighbors. The middle section, “Entr’acte,” is a garland of short poems that aren’t bookish except insofar as they arise from the cultivated ground of Chappell’s mind and sensibility. If he had not already established himself as an uncannily accurate reporter of country scenes, “Bee” would make his reputation:

The house is changed where

death has come,

as the rose is changed

by the visit of the bee and his

freight of pollen.

The house is opened

to the mercies

of strangers to whom the

dead father

is presented like a

delectable veal,

for whom the linens are

unearthed

and spread to air, the whiskies

decanted.

Survivors gossip their

last respects:

a bumble of voices in the

living room

like the drowse of music

around the white hive busy in

the sunny field.

In the breathless

upstairs bedroom

one lost bee

crawls the pane behind the

glass curtain,

searching to enter that field and

all its clovers.

What sets such pieces—fine as they are—is their placement between the prologues and epilogues, the bookish poems that range in tone and time to invoke and re-enliven the culture’s resources. “Patience,” a prologue to The Georgies, opens with a vision of rural life:

The farmers and their animals

have sculpted the world

To a shape like some smooth

monumental family group.

The father mountains and the

mother clouds, their progeny meadows

Stationed about them, as if

posing for a photograph

To be taken from a silver orbiter

spaceship by beings

Like angelic horses, who return

to their home world

With pleasant report: Leave

Earth alone, it is at peace.

But he goes on immediately to say:

Always the Poet knew it wasn’t

that way.

Total War throughout the globe,

justice and injustice

Confounded, every sort of

knavery, the plow

Disused unhonored, the farmer

conscripted and his scythe

Straitly misshapen to make a

cruel sword.

And later, he makes his point with more animus:

Such slaughter, they say,

manures the fields of Utopia.

So that the plowman in a

sleepier century

Turns up the bones of a

legendary Diomedes

And marvels that the land used

to nourish those giants

Who have now become the

subsoil in which the Capitol

Is footed: where the softhanded

senators daylong

Argue the townsman’s ancient

case against the farmer:

He is behind the times, he will

never understand.

The decisions there brought

back to the homestead in the form of taxes

And soldiers, who look with

envious eyes upon this life

They fleer at, guzzling the

murky raw-edged country wine.

But nothing changes. The war

grinds over the world and all

Its politics, the soldiers marry

the farmers’ daughters

And tell their plowman sons

about the fight at the Scaean Cate,

And the other sanguine

braveries the dust has eaten.

Sundown still draws the

chickens to their purring roost.

The cow to the milking stall,

the farmer to his porch to watch

Whether the soaring

constellations promise rain.

There is an abundance here, of extraordinary work, but beyond the individually excellent poems, there is that model in Fred Chappell’s mind and on these pages, of what kind of life to aspire to, what it means to be “A Man of Letters in the Modern World.” The phrase is one Tate used as a title for a collection of essays, and is appropriate because Chappell’s model may be somewhat modernized and improved from Tate’s version, but is akin to it. (One of these new poems is “Afternoons with Allen,” a prologue to Tate’s The Fathers.)

Rilke and Roethke have both told us that for poetry we must change our lives. Chappell, in his quiet way, makes a more profound suggestion—that poetry may also be a way of saving our lives. If there could be justice, charm, generosity, wisdom, decency, pity, and taste all working together—as they are here, in miraculous abundance—we would have every reason to hope.

[First and Last Words, by Fred Chappell (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press) 57 pp., $13.95 cloth; $6.95 paper]