The Lookout Man (Phoenix Poets)
Description
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.”
Praise for The Lookout Man (Phoenix Poets)
"[Dischell's] poems are painterly and cinematic—they can be movies that are improvisational and beautifully clear. But don’t let that fool you. His poems show us how we construct ourselves and our affections with language and images of ourselves and others, an imaginative spirit that is also an investigative spirit."
— StorySouth
“Dischell offers lines as odes to the world in which we live and of the world we too quickly forget. Within these poems there’s a haunting nostalgia wrestled into the present moment; yet, the deeper we delve, the past appears as clearly as a ‘lake at dawn / When the wind is still.’ These poems not only hold wisdom but they also hold ‘lives once so real and fragrant’ that all one can do is pour a glass of wine and read on with an open heart.”
— A. Van Jordan, author of The Cineaste
“A sumptuous melancholy suffuses the poems in Dischell’s outstanding collection. Like the wind itself, Dischell voyages ‘across the wide seas . . .’ bringing us the great and small of human existence—cities, politics, battleships, baked apples, polka-dot sheets, and above all, our human selves, vulnerable to loss and the ravages of time.”
— Ellen Bass, author of Indigo
“Dischell is the American heir to the European poets, Szymborska, Tranströmer, and Salamun with his wit, loving skepticism, and ever-present sense of the tragic. With poems that evoke Dischell’s Litvak heritage, and the unforgiving American experience of assimilation, in The Lookout Man, Dischell reminds us of the essential gift of dedicated endurance. This tender, very human book is haunted by time, and attentive to the fragile, fleeting things of the world and the heart. And yet, while Dischell chronicles this heartbreak of the daily, like Zagajewski, in the end he keeps casting ‘lines that believe in the future’ and it is the unexpected gold of life that shines through.”
— Ellen Hinsey, author of The Illegal Age
"With a haunting nostalgia that wrestles the past into the present, Stuart Dischell’s The Lookout Man is wise and reminiscent of the best of Frost and Auden. Dichell’s poems bring readers elegies and odes written to honor life and history: men of the early twentieth century navigating a new language, ships at sea forgotten by those who live inland, evolutionary progress, brave young women who use their bodies as instruments of change. Contemporary and contemplative, combining chaos with quiet, The Lookout Man is a collection that places Dischell among poetic greats like Serhiy Zhadan and Patrick Phillips."
— Colorado Review
