Böcker av Stuart Dischell

Stuart Dischell's poetry is passionate, darkly comic, heartbreaking, and always unpredictable. Dig Safe reaffirms why he commands high regard among poets and critics and popularity among his readers. Taking as their metaphor the markings that construction workers use to warn of utilities below street level—these new poems pierce the body politic as they evoke interconnection and misalliance, movement and inhabitation.

"Sometimes elegiac, sometimes deadly comic, but always vivid and surprising, The Lookout Man embodies the mastery, spirit, and craft that we have come to depend upon in Stuart Dischell's poetry. In a mix of recognizable lyric forms, and set in diverse locales from the middle of the ocean to the summit of Mont Blanc, from America's back yard to the streets of international cities, there is a hesitant, almost encroaching wisdom in The Lookout Man, alternately nostalgic and fierce in nature. The poet doesn't shy away from taking on the big, risky, some would say played-out topics, but the poems never lead us where we expect to go. Rather, Dischell allows messy contradictions to exist in the drama and action of the poems, even while maintaining the beautiful form and music of polished verse. In a wonderful example that closes the book and that typifies Dischell's work, he writes, "I will ask the dogwoods to remind me // "What it means to live along the edges of the woods / To be promiscuous but bear white flowers.""--

The poems in Stuart Dischell's prizewinning first collection, Good Hope Road, inhabit a geography of seeming contradictions where lyric and narrative, personal life and mythic yearning, the domestic and the historic, the elegant and the impure converge. Like Joyce's Dubliners, the twelve poems of the opening sequence, "Apartments", reflect a wide panorama of contemporary urban consciousness, Dischell's subjects are wronged lovers, thwarted citizens, an idealistic veteran, bickering relations - all with their entangled, fractious alliances. As a counterweight, "Household Gods", the book's second section, presents lyric and dramatic monologues whose scenes are the shore, the city, and the countryside. Here are homages and elegies, poems of childhood, betrayal, and loss. Observant and compassionate, Good Hope Road introduces a striking and powerful writer.