These poems are freighted with longing and doubt but they are never naive. Passionate, unflinching family stories and personal loss are here, and yet the will to love breaks all molds.

Sadoff's subject, as Jon Anderson once remarked, is sadness . . . rendered with intelligence, accuracy, and poignancy.

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...