Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, June 6, 1993                   TAG: 9306060206
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: F-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Reviewed by DAN GRIBBIN
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

WHAT YOU `C' IS WHAT YOU GET

The title of this book is the Roman numeral that stands for 100. What you "C" is what you get _ one hundred poems, mostly playful, by the modern master of light (and some rather more serious) verse. Light verse is undergoing something of a renaissance at present, but Fred Chappell's work, both his fiction and his poetry, would be popular at any time. This volume demonstrates why.

"A playful serious purpose informs the whole." That's a line from one of the selections in "C," a poem about a fancy lamp, but it deserves to be placed on the title page as an epigraph for the entire volume.

Alongside that should go a notice to reviewers that would read something like this: "By all means move some books and make me bucks with your mighty Bics./ But don't for God's sake pour it on too Karo-syrupy thick."

One of the most admirable qualities of Fred Chappell's writing is that he refuses to take himself too seriously. We laugh with him at pompous asses like Senator No (Could this figure in "El Perfecto" possibly be Jesse Helms, Fred?), but his attacks, grounded in common sense and social sanity, are never gratuitously caustic or bitchy. The volume has a tone which leaves the door open to taking the poet seriously when, as occasionally happens, the elegiac or the lyrical mood is upon him.

His "Aubade" updates a traditional form so beautifully and artlessly that we have to pinch ourselves to remeber that we are dealing with the everyday. It begins with these evocative lines: "Wake up, Susan. Let's walk around the lake/ This morning while the air is cool and rain/ Drips from the oaks after the midnight storm."

And yet, Mr. Chappell has one fatal flaw _ a blind spot rare in one so clearly cognizant of which side the bread of modern poets gets buttered on, and by whom. In a word, he dares to attack the pomposity, the cant and the pedantry of the modern Literary Critic, a class of noble American who (and this he well knows, friends; this he well knows) must always be treated as a Sacred Cow, a bovine breed apart never to be slaughtered in public view.

(What were you thinking, Fred? Don't we have a deal?) In any event, on behalf of the BBEELT (Benevolent Brotherhood of Excruciatingly Exigetic Literary Tortuositors) I have composed a response which, I trust, will serve to hoist Mr. Chappell on his own lightly versed petard. Entitled (with apologies to pop artist Richard Hamilton) "The Critic Laughs," the response goes something like this:

Herr Chappell amusesi

Whenever he chooses.

He won't posture lamely,

Nor toady up tamely.

He staunchly refuses

To court us or schmooze us.

You see what his game is:

He's out to de-fame us.

Final note to the Gentle Reader: If you don't buy another poetry book this year, flash a C-note in front of your favorite bookseller and demand several copies of "C" _ one for home consumption, the others to pass out to friends. But be forewarned: Light verse is very, very contagious.

Dan Gribbin teaches literature and film at Ferrum College. He is fiction editor of `Artemis.'

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