The Optimist

by Joshua Mehigan

In Joshua Mehigan’s award-winning poetry, one encounters a lucid, resolute vision driven by an amazing facility with the metrical line. Most of the poems in The Optimist unapologetically employ traditional poetic technique, and, in each of these, Mehigan stretches the fabric of living language over a framework of regular meter to produce a compelling sonic counterpoint. The Optimist stares at contemporary darkness visible, a darkly lit tableau that erases the boundary between the world and the perceiving self. Whether narrative or lyric, dramatic or satirical, Mehigan’s poems explore death, desire, and change with a mixture of reason and compassion. In choosing The Optimist for the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, final judge James Cummins, wrote: “The world is given its due in these poems, but its due is the subjective voice making ‘objective’ reality into the reality of art. To do this Mehigan accesses a tradition of voices—the echoes in The Optimist are, to name a few, of Frost, Robinson, Kees, and Justice; and more in terms of point of view, Bishop and Jarrell—to form with great integrity his own. It isn’t that Mehigan is concerned more with what’s outside himself than inside; nor merely that he travels the highway between the two with such humility and grace. It’s also that these voices, this great tradition, infuses his line with what the best verse, metrical or free, must have: wonder.”

Genres: Poetry

61 pages, Paperback

First published December 15, 2004

About the author

Joshua Mehigan's first book, The Optimist (Ohio UP, 2004), was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry and winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. His second book, Accepting the Disaster, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. His poems have been featured in many periodicals, including Poetry, The New York Times, The New Republic, and Ploughshares, on Poetry Daily and The Writer’s Almanac, and in anthologies such as Poetry: A Pocket Anthology (Penguin, 2008) and Bright Wings (Columbia UP, 2009). He was the recipient, in 2011, of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Reviews

[Jenna]

Preternaturally calm and unrushed, deliberate and restrained, The Optimist is a surprisingly mature work, considering that it was Mehigan's debut collection of poems (it was published in the poet's 35th year, according to the liner notes). Here is marble instead of limestone, a well-done steak instead of a raw pink cow corpse. Mehigan's writing is remarkable for its unwavering lucidity and integrity, its dedication to un-sensationalized truth and un-ostenstatious eloquence, its commitment to perceiving worldly matters objectively and relating them evenhandedly.

Auden famously asserted that "poetry makes nothing happen." In many of Mehigan's poems, indeed, nothing much happens. For the most part, these poems are idylls, interludes, slow-motion reels. Mehigan doesn't give his audience fast-paced car chases to gawk at; instead, his camera zooms in on the noir-ish scene of the antihero sitting on his couch, twiddling his thumbs morosely, doing virtually nothing at all. Even the few poems in The Optimist that concern "dramatic" subjects like murder, suicide, and conflagration are luxuriantly slow-moving -- more lyrical than dramatic, really. But Mehigan's poems are ample evidence in support of the viewpoint that lyricism, rather than dramatics, is what poetry actually does best. In Mehigan's poems, anticlimax is given a makeover, dressed up in a white lace dress, and shoved into the reader's arms with eloquent assurances that this is in fact a virgin bride. And the poems are so beautifully written that the reader entirely believes it.

These poems reverence stillness. (See what I did there, using a noun as a verb?) While allusions to history and mythology are relatively infrequent in this book, it is telling that the three historical personages who do make an appearance in The Optimist are all persons who achieved fame for spending a lot of time being physically still: the 5th-century Christian ascetic saint Simeon Stylites, the 4th-century Christian ascetic saint(?) Alexandra, and the Roman emperor Nero (who stood still and fiddled, rather than fighting or fleeing or doing any effing thing a rational human being might do in his circumstances).

Mehigan wields iambic pentameter with the effortless dexterity of a grandmother knitting in the darkness of a movie theater. And we could all learn something from him about how to mold/shape/sculpt a poem and how important it is to cap a poem with a killer last line: "Wish is the word that sounds like what wind means." or "Animals always know when they are dirty." Looking forward to his next book.

[Lucy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The rhymes and musical language in this book are exquisite and never trite! Poetry at its highest!

[Roger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disappointing after having read his 2nd book 1st (much more engaging). A bit too much of a set piece with forced rhyming to the detriment of lyric.

That said, had I read this 1st perhaps an "extra half star."

[Josh Cohen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very impressive formalist poet

[Cameron Brooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good but more depressing with every poem.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a joy to read. The poems are inventive, sharply precise (except where an obliqueness is called for), brilliantly formal (in most cases).

I am not normally a reader of what is called "[contemporary] formalist poetry" but would surely have regretted not following up on the TLS's end-of-the-year authors' suggestions about Mehigan's second volume, to which I shall turn shortly. I was sure I had read the opening poem, "Promenade," which has the speaker happening upon a marriage in Bowne Park, Queens, done entirely in couplets and concluding with "Wish is the word that sounds like what wind means," a lovely line reflecting the bride's orange hair coming unpinned "by ordinary, inconvenient wind." "Riddle" carries the reader back to the Anglo-Saxon but offers no answer. "War Dims Hope for Peace" is four quatrains of brilliantly chosen post-9/11 headlines. "The Optimist," title poem to the collection, a sonnet broken into three stanzas, observes a woman diagnosed with terminal cancer; it ends:

"She wasn't making light. It seemed to her
that cancer just rehearsed life's attitude
that one's desires must taper to a point,
which has position, but no magnitude."

The complexity of the situation, the woman's feelings, and the poem are conveyed by repetitions of words and phrases, moving toward the simplicity of the final lines.

"After a Nightmare" presents a little boy unable to sleep walking in on his parents having sex; they come to tuck him in:

"It was a dream, his father said--
a lie the hush might underscore.
He let the murderer kiss his head,
and then he nodded to the whore."

Whether the child might have this thought seems doubtful though the observer/narrator could. The effect of the poem comes from the movement out of and the repetitions from the opening stanza:

"The room was hushed. His eyes had dried.
Still, bad thoughts brightened in the dark;
Light faded in, but that light lied.
Each breath was like a grave remark."

"Retirement"

"The man became himself again. His health
seemed perfect in the free mornings spent
next to his wife in bed; in afternoons
of reading on the couch and picking which
shoes to wear to restaurants; and in
the night's exquisite weariness, and sleep.

"The man became himself again, and after
thirty-two years of selling lithographs,
he thought he had ideas to return to.
His health was proven perfect by the doctor,
a woman, he noticed, twenty years his junior,
and so, to celebrate, he bought an easel.

"He thought he had ideas to return to
in the mornings changed to afternoons at the table.
He was healthy during afternoons of staring,
picking shoes to wear the evenings out.
And in the night's exquisite weariness
and sleep, the man became himself again."

Sans rhyme, this poem shows the intricate interweaving that characterizes Mehigan's mode, allowing him to put the reader into his characters' situations by using the iteration to force attention to shifts and nuance.

I might cite other poems in detail, but I find myself, in retirement, rather too lazy. Get your hands on this book, and see for yourself.

[Daniel Klawitter · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best thing about this book of poems (other than many of the poems themselves), is the irony of the title.

There are some very, very dark poems here (although many are sharply, perhaps wickedly funny at the same time...which requires no small amount of skill on the part of the poet), but "optimistic" is not the right adjective to describe the contents.

There are unfulfilled marriages, butchered rabbits, a woman dying of cancer, a son's nightmare, and an advice poem to a woman suffering postpartum depression. But all are rendered in such savagely controlled and wonderfully crafted language and meter that they leave you admiring the artistry in spite of the "down" key of the subject matter itself.

This is really great stuff...and it isn't all gloom by any means.

I'll close by sharing this tenderhearted poem about a runaway daughter:

She slept. sleep was a stupid hiding place.
Rest hadn't come so easily for him.
Running his thumb along her moonlit face,
grown calm, as his had, in the interim,
he wondered what she thought she could escape.
Her head peeped from the quilt beneath her chin
like someone's shoe exposed beneath a drape,
as he rehearsed the ways he might begin.
The ear he chose was downed with light. His chest
throbbed, and the throbbing made him want to pause.
Something suggested it was loveliest
to watch her face a moment how it was.

[Liam Malone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many poems focused on what might be the smallest bits of life. Magnified into the wonder of the everyday and mundane living. A very good first collection. He has some poems in a recent Poetry, so I look forward to a new collection.

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding craftsmanship with resonating senses of certain experiences. This collection of poems was hailed by John Hollander.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yowza

[S. · Rating 5 out of 5]

"It was impossible to transcend the Western Tradition of Sunday."