Stuart Dischell

Stuart Dischell's new chapbook sings of adventuresome travel and camaraderie. On the waterfront, we find drunken captains, dissolute merchants and, improbably, a momentary restful pause. In the countryside and in the city, Dischell focuses not on any landscape or sight, but on the way one's friendships frame experience, expanding it beyond known dimensions.Poetry.

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.

Evenings & Avenues, the new collection of poems by award-winning writer Stuart Dischell, captures the yearning spirit of the end of our century. These lyrics and story-poems are set in locales as varied as Boston, Sarajevo, and London, in wax-works, shops, bedrooms, and, most frequently, a street, an avenue, or a boulevard, where the seven "Evening" poems that punctuate the book take place. Dischell's poems are passionate, sometimes darkly comic, sometimes heartbreaking, and always unpredictable. They animate a world between possibility and destiny.

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.

There is a gentleness in the midst of savagery in Stuart Dischell’s fifth full-length collection of poetry. These poems are ever aware of the momentary grace of the present and the fleeting histories that precede the instants of time. Part elegist, part fabulist, part absurdist, Dischell writes at the edges of imagination, memory, and experience. By turns outwardly social and inwardly reflective, comic and remorseful, the beautifully crafted poems of Children with Enemies transfigure dread with a reluctant wisdom and come alive to the confusions and implications of what it means to be human.

Another set of antidotal lyrics and story-poems from Stuart Dischell 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 startling 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.

Vivid poems full of drama and action by award-winning poet Stuart Dischell. Sometimes elegiac, sometimes deadly comic, and always transformative, The Lookout Man embodies the energy, spirit, and craft that we have come to depend upon in Stuart Dischell’s poetry. Inhabiting a mix of lyric structures, these poems are set in diverse locales from the middle of the ocean to the summit of Mont Blanc, from the backyards of America to the streets of international cities. There is a hesitant, almost encroaching wisdom in The Lookout Man , as Dischell allows his edgy vision and singular perspectives to co-exist with the music of his poems. In lines that close the book and typify 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.”

There is a gentleness in the midst of savagery in Stuart Dischell’s fifth full-length collection of poetry. These poems are ever aware of the momentary grace of the present and the fleeting histories that precede the instants of time. Part elegist, part fabulist, part absurdist, Dischell writes at the edges of imagination, memory, and experience. By turns outwardly social and inwardly reflective, comic and remorseful, the beautifully crafted poems of Children with Enemies transfigure dread with a reluctant wisdom and come alive to the confusions and implications of what it means to be human.