Brendan Cleary's poems have never been for the squeamish or faint hearted. They smack of the streets all around us. His often manic personas confront their demons, lay bare their hearts and reveal the anguish of their personal disorder in the city's terrain. Stranger in the House sees Cleary in the realm of the urban epiphany. Tragic, sad, but darkly comic, his poems speak for the dispossessed, the bed-sit dwellers, the losers in love. The dominant ideology is held up to question in these sketches of spoiled idealism revealing a very subtle artfulness. Uncompromising and honest, Cleary continues to strike at raw nerves and his work reminds us how poetry can be a vital and haunting force.