First and Last Words

Fred Chappell

If every poem in Fred Chappell's eighth collection, First and Last Words, were as good as “An Old Mountain Woman Reading the Book of Job,” Fred Chappell would have written, hands down, the finest book of poetry released during the twentieth century. They aren't, not all of them, but a fair number are good enough to put this book in, say, the top twenty, sharing the rarefied air of Charles Simic's The World Doesn't End, Robert Lowell's Lord Weary's Castle, Hayden Carruth's Collected Shorter Poems, and other such lights.

First and Last Words, a book that can loosely be called the beginning of Chappell's modern period, is where the poet turned slightly from the hardcore imagist work he'd been doing previously and looked toward a more abstract notion of poetry. He did so, however, without falling prey to the vagueness (or, lord help us, the idea that poems should be “message-based”) that turns so many potential poets into unreadable hacks. Nowehere is this better illustrated than in “An Old Mountain Woman Reading the Book of Job.”

“...She moves her lips to read but does not speak.
What is there to answer these terrible words,
To these sharp final words that engrave the fate
Of a hammered old man?...”

Beautifully rendered images combine with musings of characters, animals, even the elements at times. First and Last Words is brilliant, and deserves to be on the short shelf.