The Old Stoic Faces the Mirror: A Life in Poems

Most of these poems focus on the thoughts, sentiments, and experiences of Fred Bassett. These are predominately narrative poems, but they include a mingling of lyrical poems. Together, they will hopscotch the reader over time from his boyhood into his elderhood. Other poems focus on family, relatives, friends, neighbors, and students--people he often interacted with along his spiritual and intellectual journey. There are also a few persona poems scattered throughout the collection. Obviously, they are but a sampling of those individuals whose voices came to him either through oral stories, especially the stories of his elders, or the written word. For one reason or another, he found himself drawn into the lives of some of these people and thus needed to let them tell a part of their story. In other persona poems, a few of the individuals, who have enriched his life or taught him important lessons, tell some significant part of their story. Bassett is very conscious of the fact that we are social animals, that we would not be human without social connections. These connections start at birth and follow us, at least in our psyche, to our death. Some of the poems are told on the slant, just as Emily Dickinson advised poets, but all of the poems are accessible. None are written just for academics or other poets.

"The stories distilled into Fred Bassett's poems present noble lives as well as tragic and twisted one: enough to fill several categories of bookstore shelves. This poet does what many writers can only hope to do. He takes his experience of a small place and makes it universal, large enough to include us all. While you might hear echoes of Spoon River, you'll mostly find the strong spice of vivid life leavened by a reality of place and time that needs no linguistic hyperbole to lift it to literature. His poems attend--as in "wait" and "tend to"--hard work on the land, nature in its mysterious and harsh beauty, sudden violence, betrayals, suicides, accidents that maim or kill, the rituals of religion and simple domesticity--all with the deepest respect and love that is careful to say so. With all his people--from the ghosts of Creek warriors and the small-town folks and farmers that repopulate their land to his lucky students, university colleagues, and those who wait to re-enter his Alabama earth--the poet takes us to his "backwoods" in search of visions. Not unlike good hooch, Fred Bassett's distillations come out of those backwoods we are happy he has known so well, and then they become ours."

• Quitman Marshall, Author of You Were Born One Time

"Fred Bassett's poetry is historical, theological, and philosophical. It is personal memoir and documentary that speaks to universal quests for finding one's way in the world. Each page is a heart-felt treasure. Here's the last stanza of the last poem: And there's a truth that can lift you up / with a thousand strokes of wonder-- / there to soar on the currents of Being, / stilled at last to face the sting of death."

• Sue Walker, Scholar, poet, and publisher of Negative Capability Press