A review of Fred Chappell, Familiars, LSU Press, 2014.
The cat, the felis silverstrus catus, both wild and domesticated, has exercised a considerable fascination for the creative artist throughout the thousands of years of Western and non-Western civilization. One need only peruse art and history books containing sculptures of the animal originating in Byzantium and Egypt, among other ancient locales, to see how symbolic it has been to very sophisticated early cultures; the Egyptians, of course, even fitted one of their deities, Bast, with the head of a cat out of respect for the cat’s mystery and sense of power. The literary arts too have manifested their own share of bauble-eyed, four-legged fur persons (to pilfer the title of the short and charming novel by May Sarton). The most conspicuous is probably the maddening, eponymous creature in one of Poe’s most famous short stories, “The Black Cat.” But there are others: the English poet Christopher Smart wrote of his cat Geoffrey in literal and ecstatic religious terms, while, two centuries later, pop novelist Stephen King used a less benevolent feline to represent much darker emotions in his screenplay Cat’s Eye. The work of T.S. Eliot was revived …
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