Family Gathering

*Family Gathering* is a rare gift: a book that one can share with others. I first read the book after encountering some of Chappell's other poetry and prose and hearing him read at a conference. Making full use of rhyme and structure, Chappell weaves a tale of some kind of family gathering--the occasion isn't important. The fact that the family has congregated together is. Framed by poems about a young girl who can't understand's adults' need to talk everything to death at such gatherings, Chappell's book roams from person to person, introducing us to characters like Uncle Einar, a likable blow-hard who "smokes his big cigar." We also meet his wife, Aunt Wilma, who "makes him pay" for every mistake the old philanderer commits. We meet others as well, some named and some not. The strength of this approach is obvious: we all have these people in our families. We all know an Uncle Einar; we all have at least one outcast cousin; we all have that one aunt at our reunions who insists on taking everyone's picture. Chappell's poems are laugh-out-loud funny, a rarity these days when poetry tends to be about little but itself. *Family Gathering* is a book you can buy for those non-poetry poeple on your gift list. It'll show them that poetry can indeed be for everybody and needn't be an exclusive, elitist pursuit.

Fred Chappell, one of our modern poetic masters, has given us a book that brings its reader no-holds-barred pleasure. Chappell renders his family portraits with wit and craft, using rhyme, for example, that makes us sit up and take notice, lift our ears, ready for more. This book is a loving, though sometimes caustic and, yes, sly, evocation of family. We finish reading it feeling as if we know these people, indeed have always known them. Chappell invites us onto the front porch, into the kitchen, the parlor, the upstairs and downstairs of a dwelling populated by an extended family as eccentric and memorable as our own.