Moments of Light — Fred Chappell

Moments of Light Foreward by Annie Dillard.  These stories prove that the mythic powers of the balladeer and the story teller survive even in this fragmented and unmysterious day. In the eleven stories gathered here, Fred Chappell engages and entertains our minds and sends us away singing in our hearts, more knowing, more understanding of ourselves. 


Fred Chappell's voice is sure and his vision is keen. As Annie Dillard writes in the foreword: "These are living, vivid narratives whose rich actions lodge in the imagination: world-wise and gentle Mr. Cody blowing up a tree; Norma, the drunk in love with innocence, quoting Shakespeare's sonnets in her ruined rooms; young Rosemary in the hayloft sticking her underpants under the hay; Mrs. Franklin pleased and bewildered at her own dinner party; and Stovebolt Johnson playing the blues in the Blue Dive, carrying himself in the world so carefully, with such thoughtfulness and controlled pain. These stories are as real as days." 


Moments of Light reflects the moral nature of man throughout history. In the first story, "The Three Boxes," Chappell writes, as only a poet or a philosopher would, "The lone man was alone"; with that he begins at once to sound the major themes of the book from the creation throught the mostly innocent vision of the Enlightenment to this dark and wearisome time when Stovebolt Johnson, the balladeer in "Blue Dive", works a tavern for beers. The title story points up the end of man's intellectual innocence and the shortcomings of reason alone as the composer Haydn peers through a telescope at the fearsome beauty of the universe and sees dread and hope alike reborn.


Fred Chappell served as Poet Laureate of North Carolina.