"Backsass" is a collection of humorous poems. Not that "Ole Fred," as he often refers to himself, hasn't always been funny. He's just rarely been so in such concentration, offering us titles like "Someone Told Me Death Can't Take a Joke," "Down With Democracy," and "The Nothing Which Is Not Poetry." Two long poems are "imitations" of Juvenal satires, as when in "The Sorrows of Intellectual Life" he writes:
Perhaps you'd speech-write for a senatorWhose whole vocabulary totals fourAnd whose political ideas are suchFour little words attire them overmuch.
Poems spoken by an answering machine bookend the volume:
I am Fred's answering machineI have many of the answersFred has noneso you better talk to me
In another, a man wakes on New Year's Day with a hangover he realizes is the same one he had last year at this time.
it had aged a year and thataccounted for most of the changesthough obviously it had grownno wiser with the passage of time . . .a jaded thing it was these dayscynicalfor 365 days in a rowevery promise made to it
had been broken
The collection ends as it began:
I am Fred's answering machine You would not have dialed this number againunless you had dialed many othersand were disappointed with their answers . . . don't call here again
"More Lights Than One" contains 13 very readable essays by the likes of R.H.W. Dillard, George Hovis, and John Lang; a poem by Kelly Cherry; a foreword by Robert Morgan; and a concluding essay by Fred himself. Poet, essayist and critic, novelist, teacher -- Chappell has had a rich and varied career. His seems a quiet life, one which Chappell gently mocks in his poem "Rimbaud Fire Letter to Jim Applewhite," in interviews, and, here, in "Too Many Freds." ("I must think that any reader who would pursue the eluctable Fred through so many combinations and permutations must be in dire need of recreation.")
