Backwards Days

by Stuart Dischell

Overview

Sly, comic, inventive, and exuberant, the brokenhearted lyrics and dark parables of Backwards Days are cast in the spirit and craft Stuart Dischell’s poetry is known for. In this, his fourth full-length collection, he revs up both music and experience and writes poems of emotional intensity that chronicle the restlessness of desire. Sometimes grim, ever buoyant and hopeful, even in the most sorrowful or macabre situations, the poems of Backwards Days are most particularly about the movement of time, physical movement, and the movement of the heart. Through landscapes both real and of the psyche, they live on the edge of an elusive understanding never quite gotten right.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781440619052
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/02/2007
Series:	Penguin Poets
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
File size:	104 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Stuart Dischell's work has appeared in many publications, including The New Republic, Partisan Review, and Ploughshares. He has been awarded the Pushcart Prize and a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Literature. He teaches at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Editorial Reviews

Blue-collar heartbreak and terse, hard-won wisdom dominate this vivid fourth outing, in which crowds of men and women try to do "the basic human thing": Dischell's quiet protagonists traipse riverbanks, promise to "attend/ The weddings and burials," and mull the connections between mourning and rejoicing, hope and memory, lust and love. The clever title poem declares the poet's affections in terms drawn from a kindergarten ritual; a surprising pantoum tells a story about "a blind girl in Paris." Some of his best works are compressed narratives: "Tale of the Garret," for example, updates a familiar fable in order to ask how the airy concerns of the imagination might blind us to the concrete causes for other people's pain. Dischell (Dig Safe) takes his metaphors from all over (anthropologists' "first contact" with primitive tribes, for example) and his sometimes dysphemistic cadences from such gritty inventors as Charles Simic: his figures of speech may shock ("I went to kiss/ The cat-tongue rough/ Of her each bent knee"), but his core concerns are down-to-earth. Dischell's sometimes gruff (and always brief) poems ask where dejection and affection can manage to keep each other in good company-if not for a lifetime, at least for a page or two. (Oct.)

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Publishers Weekly

The poems in Dischell's fifth collection (after Dig Safe) conjure a disembodied consciousness aspiring to define itself in a spectral, melancholy universe: "The cities were anonymous/ The problems generic/ And the people who lived/ Out their lives did nothing/ Remarkable." Time is marked by "Days of ritual and small gestures," and if human contact occurs at all, it's precariously carried out over great distances-"And we were/ Voice to voice/ Below the orbiting/ Satellites, I/ In the parking lot/ And you by the sea"-subject to being "cut off in a region of lost signals." Loners traverse neglected or sparsely drawn landscapes with forgotten purpose ("No place to rush or anyone to fool./ No words interfered with that rhythm"), trapped between irretrievable pasts and impossible futures. Like Paul Verlaine and other French symbolists, Dischell favors shade over color, and his modest dashes of irony and surrealism create a noirish sense of intrigue. Though these hermetic poems at first seem glancing, almost parenthetical, they suggest a larger, troubled text, invisible, perhaps unwritten, but no less vital-or human-for that. Recommended for large collections.
—Fred Muratori

Library Journal