Bloodfire

Spring Garden selects poems from six of Fred Chappell's previous collections and adds to them some thirty new ones. Seven sections on different themes compose the main body of the book, and each section is provided a prologue. A General Prologue and an Epilogue are supplied too, and all these taken together make up a loose and gentle narrative, a story of the poet classifying and selecting among his work while his wife, Susan, botanizes in their private garden. Their parallel labors completed, they look toward the approaching long twilight. Chappell is known for designing his poetry books as wholes, and Spring Garden, though it represents the compositions of twenty-five years, is no exception. Its contents are varied but unified, its purposes serious but congenial. And though the volume is suffused with an elegiac tone, these pages contain surprises in plenty and friendly good humor.