Good Hope Road

by Stuart Dischell

Overview

Good Hope Road is one of those rare books of verse that combine lyricism with the momentum of narrative, a concern for dailiness with a willingness to embrace wildness. 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. In “Household Gods,” the book’s second section, Dischell presents 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, this edition of Good Hope Road reintroduces the work of a striking and powerful writer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780887486128
Publisher:	Carnegie-Mellon University Press
Publication date:	04/04/2016
Series:	Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary Series: Poetry Series
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Stuart Dischell is the author of six collections of poetry, including Dig Safe, Backwards Days, and Children with Enemies. His first collection, Good Hope Road, was selected for the National Poetry Series, and he has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ledig-Rowohlt Foundation. Dischell teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

What People are Saying About This

Derek Walcott

“Dischell is a fine poet, devoted to the care and craftsmanship of his vocation.”

Thomas Lux

“These poems are rambunctious and wise, angry and funny and graceful. . . . Dischell is a poet of spirit and craft.”

Editorial 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.'' (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

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.

Library Journal