Modern Age - Spring 2016 - 150

MODERN AGE

SPRING 2016

Another group of poems associates cats with literature, history, religion, art, scholarship, and a library. In "After Hours," Nora
the library cat makes her guardian rounds all night in a repository of human knowledge, creativity-and folly. On the lookout
for ". . . mouse, beetle, and silverfish, / The mutter of computer
viruses," she protects not only books by "Novelists who titillate or
affright, / Athletes boasting of everything they do," but also works
by "Poets for fit audience though few." After making her rounds,
Nora rewards herself appropriately for such a cat: ". . . she relaxes
to peruse a book / And socialize with famous brilliant minds / That
every cat feels privileged to know: / Sherlock, Maigret, Lord Wimsey, and Poirot."
Making another kind of round, in "Security," is the aptly named
Paisano. Guardian of the farm, Paisano misses nothing during
his daylong patrol-cow milking, training his male kittens "for
tomcathood," looking for mice in the hay, overhearing theological arguments about God as debated by two mules who employ
a ". . . logic that could confound the schools," and ending up, in
the poem's closing stanza, by combining a humanlike aesthetic
appreciation and precise scientific observation with duty and
action: "He notes the flights of swallows, songs of wrens; / He
counts the robins, bobwhite, and the quail, / Admires the rainbow
of the rooster's tail, / Alert for any sound disturbing the hens. / The
fox and weasel do not despoil and rob; / The farm is safe. Paisano's
on the job." Perhaps a nod to the southern agrarian writers and
Chappell's own early farm life can be detected in this poem.
But earthly life, however safe at times, always ends in death.
Thus, in "Passerby," which recalls the scene of Thomas Hardy's
poem "Channel Firing," a black cat, Margo, walks across a human
grave, her shadow cast upon the tombstone and the name. The
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Modern Age - Spring 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Spring 2016

Contents
Modern Age - Spring 2016 - Cover1
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Modern Age - Spring 2016 - Contents
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