I Am One of You Forever (review)

(1976), and Spring Onions and Cornbread (1978). In our Bread Loaf summer, the informal students' reading in the Barn on the mountain was arranged with Bettie Sellers scheduled as one of many readers. She prefaced her presentation with the comment that it was her first public reading. The Bread Loaf audience felt, even then, what Madeleine L'Engle calls Sellers' "strange glory and dailiness." Her rotund figure reminds me somewhat of the shape of the poet in a 1950s film of Theodore Roethke reading his work. She does not read in the style of the fifties, but does emanate a mythic depth beneath a smooth and ordinary flesh. Sellers is now a familiar reader of her poetry for audiences in Georgia and adjacent states, and has won many awards for her work. The Morning of the Red-Tailed Hawk won the Caroline Wyatt Memorial Award before publication. Her audiences and awards reflect her place in an American tradition in poetry. For example , she pays her dues to democracy. In "Three Songs Heard at Brasstown," any listener/reader can know Fingers like new-dug sweet potato roots, knobs swollen at the joints—. Her accessible allusions include the conterrrporary world in a poem for Margaret Craven, titled "I Hear the Owl Calling," and an image of light on The Thorn Birds, as well as the wealth of older references such as hymns and Biblical figures. During one of our free hours at Bread Loaf, Bettie and I revisited the roadside memorial to Robert Frost. We thought of his life and poetry, cavorted on the stones, snapped pictures , dreamed toward our own future writings. Sellers' writings not only are for a wide audience, but also show that she pays her poetic and literary dues. She appeals to writers with rich lines: "the laughter of a dead loon," "long sounds like pine needles," "a fox-grape vine," and, in "Sonnet in Stained Glass," "the windows gape like old men caught in/toothless yawns that breathe a sigh and moan." In the book's title poem, the observer "saw his eyes/smoothing the light hairs on another man's arm." Here, and throughout the volume, Sellers sees people and life clearly. Her diction recreates the human experience for the ordinary viewer; she pleases poets by her choices of image and poetic form. Her allusions are at once familiar, contemporary, literary, and mythic. Sellers' themes are universal. The reader becomes her kith and kin. —Doria D. Arndt Chappell, Fred, / Am One of You Forever. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985. Although Fred Chappell began his literary career with novels and short stories, for the last decade, he has been concentrating on his poetry. His effort in this field has been superlative as recognized this year when he became the co-winner of the prestigious BoIlingen Prize of Yale University for "the highest achievement in the field of American poetry." Thus the appearance of a new Chappell novel, / Am One of You Forever, has been eagerly anticipated, especially in regional literary circles. 76 I Am One of You Forever is filled with fascinating characters poetically described. Uncle Gurton's "arms were too long for his shirt sleeves and his hands dangled out like big price tags." "Lacey Joe would go on a hunt anytime night or day—deer, bear, groundhog , you name it. Go a-hunting piss-ants I reckon if they was in season." It is full of great dialogue: "Suppose I'd been sitting on the sunny side of the Lord and we won that game. Where would that put theml" "Might have started a theological ruckus." "They can't stand much more ruckus ... There where the road starts up Turkey Cove is your Rainbow Baptist Church ... Another two miles is the True Light Rainbow Baptist Church." "And what if we'd won that baseball game?" "They'd of had them another fight. You'd go up on the mountain and find ... The One True Light Rainbow Reformed Holiness Baptist Church of the Curveball Jesus." It is also capable of capturing non-verbal communication in a very nifty manner: "When my mother was introduced to him her hands went automatically to her hips, smoothing...