Backsass: Poems

Chappell's lively verse at its best. It questions, pokes fun, satirizes, illuminates, and provides revelations at every turn. It does what poetry should be doing in a jaded, absurd time.

Any new book by Fred Chappell is cause for celebration. In my estimation he is, word for word, page for page, the best living writer we have no in the United States.BACKSASS finds him in particularly fine form. It is a collection of poems following the satirical mode of Roman master Juvenal in which the poet gives vent to his spleen on any number of issues, including politics, poetry, and gross materialism. My own favorite among the group is his long poem on the state of contemporary intellectual life, in which he socks it to poetasters and grant-givers and LitCrits who have done so much to cripple American intellectual life with their ideologies and their peculiar theories and their determination to elevate the mediocre over the excellent (what little bit of excellence is left). (Chappell, who has never won a Pulitzer Prize or been nominated for the Nobel, may be writing out of some personal frustration here, but it is wholly justified. He never tells anything less than the truth.) His Thanksgiving poem, of near equal length, is just downright lovely. In it we see an appreciation of those things which really matter in life - friends, good food, good conversation, etc.Although Chappell is clearly bitter in places, he is never dour or dull. And his observations, in both free verse and rhymed, are must reading for optimists and pessimist alike.