Synopsis
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.
Reviews
Inspired by life in Atlantic City, N.J., in the '50s, this debut book won the 1991 National Poetry Series competition. "Apartments," the series of poems that makes up its first half, is rather familiar fare, presenting the residents of each dwelling in the context of their fears, dreams and, most of all, their losses. While the woman portrayed in "Wishes" "wishes she were older / Or younger, wishes the sky were a little calmer, / That it wouldn't rain on her driving errands, / That she wasn't so late for her appointment," the man in "Hates" "hates the bosses and oppressors, / Votes only for losing candidates, / Knows that he will never be president / Or arrive at anyone's concept of heaven." The more intimate and personal second half of the book, "Household Gods," features writing that is better modulated, albeit heavily influenced by the work of Robert Lowell (in childhood, "I was Cortez. I was Balboa. I was any / Fool in bushclothes and a monocle, / Preposterous as the rocks were ponderous"). Yet Dischell sometimes creates beautifully spare language: "He remembers the dark street and the sun / just rising. Beloved demimonde, / That life is gone. In his hand / The crescent moon of a broken saucer, / A torn admission to the domestic theatre. / Under his hat the memory of stars."
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Selected by Thomas Lux as one of the five 1991 "National Poetry" series winners, Dischell's first full-length book of poems moves deftly between domestic and surrealistic modes, from somber, plain-spoken portraits of solitary apartment dwellers ("His life seems dull so he tells a friend's story/ As if it were his own") to the blink-and-they're-gone visions of "Magic Fathers" ("One appears in a snowstorm just as you're worrying/ how you will get home"), to the subtle blending of both styles in the autobiographical "Sand" ("Working obliquely and from time to time,/ I have written this poem by ignoring it"). In synthesizing the dominant poetic strains of the 1970s with those of the 1980s, Dischell achieves an unpredictability that creates anticipation with each new page. A delightfully deceptive debut.
- Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, N.Y.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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