Good Hope Road

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.