SOURCE: Makuck, Peter. “Chappell's Continuities: First and Last Words.” Virginia Quarterly Review 68, no. 2 (spring 1992): 315-36.

In the following essay, Makuck discusses the unifying elements within Chappell's verse from Midquest to First and Last Words.

I had learned, maybe without really knowing, that not even the steadfast mountains themselves were safe and unmoving, that the foundations of the earth were shaken and the connections between the stars become frail as a cobweb.

—Fred Chappell, I Am One of You Forever

Since his tetralogy on the elements appeared under one cover as Midquest in 1981, Fred Chappell has published Castle Tzingal (1984), Source (1985), and First and Last Words (1989), all of which are linked, if not by voice, by an abiding concern with Ultimates, with faith and art, love and war. Midquest is an impressive compendium of forms and voices—poems that sing and laugh, paint and ponder, rhetorically expansive poems that tell...