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2015
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
ON CATS AND THE COSMOS a review by Rebecca Godwin James Applewhite. Cosmos: A Poem. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014. Fred Chappell. Familiars: Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014.
REBECCA GODWIN is a Professor of English at Barton College in Wilson, NC. She has published essays on Lee Smith, Fred Chappell, and Thomas Wolfe among other writers in journals such as Mississippi Quar terly, Pembroke Magazine, and Southern Quarterly. And she has reviewed poetr y for Appalachian Heritage and Asheville Poetry Review. Read her interview with Robert Morgan in NCLR 2014. She is a past President of the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, and in 2007, she served as the Chair of the North Carolina Writers Conference.
New collections from two of our state’s most distinguished poets show their creative powers in top form. Both North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame inductees, these celebrated writers also hold records for winning the Roanoke-Chowan Award in poetry: eight of Chappell’s books and four of Applewhite’s have earned that honor. To more than two dozen books of poetry, fiction, and critical commentary, former North Carolina Poet Laureate Fred Chappell adds Familiars. This delightful collection of whimsical poems celebrates cats in tightly crafted lines marked by classical allusions and clever rhymes. James Applewhite gives us his twelfth book of poetry, skillfully navigating the worlds of memory and cosmic theory in poems investigating the universe’s beginnings as well as his own. By venturing into his present life, Applewhite explores space-time movement on a human scale. The humor and good fun of Chappell’s poems make them seem lighter than the serious contemplations of space and time in Applewhite’s Cosmos, yet the collections share a common theme. Using different yet equally impressive techniques, Applewhite and Chappell clarify humans’ place in the universe as humble beings who share creation but are not worthy of lording over
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it. Both Familiars and Cosmos explore correspondences, helping us to see and enjoy the meaning of earthly objects and our connection to the whole of creation. Fred Chappell’s collection takes its title from the pagan tradition that cats embody a psychic connection to the spiritual realm and often assist humans, especially in their practice of magic. Chappell’s cats create a magic of their own with their aloof and enigmatic behavior. His introductory comments explain that Familiars grew from the poems in his 2000 collection, Family Gathering, which portrays fictional Southern kinfolk, and from the 2004 limited edition Companion Volume, which features a portrait gallery of cats belonging to that tribe. Printed by Susanne Martin’s Greensboro, NC, Yonno Press on paper made of cat hair, Companion Volume convinced Chappell that his feline friends had not finished with him yet. Cats unwilling to be only human companions kept haunting his imagination, demanding their own voice. Twenty-seven of the fifty-two poems in Familiars introduce new felines, with twenty-one poems from Companion Volume, most reworked, and four from Family Gathering. The collection joins T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of