The Optimist

By Joshua Mehigan

Book Overview

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."

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0821416111
• ISBN13: 9780821416112
• Release Date: May 2005
• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Length: 61 Pages
• Weight: 0.57 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.2" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

quite good

Mehigan is a young poet who is deeply talented and it shows with his first book. Mehigan has definitely learned his trade. These poems are well-crafted and tightly made. And there's a virtual who's who of poets who blurbed the book.

Eerily Right

Joshua Mehigan, America's premier younger poet, has a rare combination of gifts: a flawless ear and an eye for the eerily right detail. In poem after poem, he startles the reader with images that seem drawn as much from nightmare as from life. For example, in the haunting poem "The Pig Roast," a farmhand about to slaughter a pig exhibits a surprising tenderness before pulling the trigger: "Outside, the farmhand closed his day. He crouched / beside the rifle hanging from the fence / and scratched the pig's broad head, then slowly rose / as though he'd left a teacup balanced there." It is hard to imagine a more apt and beautiful way to describe the fragile gesture that the farmhand's next action will shatter. Sometimes Mehigan's imagery borders on the grotesque and comical, as in the dreamlike "Merrily," where a Rimbaud-like speaker, drifting downstream, remarks on the mesmerizing scenery in a series of bewildered questions: "West, through the trees' meshed crowns, light scattering / toward such specific ends! Why those? And why / these flexed roots? Why that oak's failed rendering / of coupled elephants in living wood?" Perhaps the most memorable image in the book appears at the conclusion of the opening poem, "Promenade," when the wind at an outdoor wedding in Queens creates a climactic spectacle that is both grittily urban and wittily urbane: "Every face turns to look; / and when the bride's tall orange bun's unpinned / by ordinary, inconvenient wind, / all, in the breath it takes a yard of hair / to blaze like lighted aerosol, would swear/ there was no greater miracle in Queens. / Wish is the word that sounds like what wind means." Good luck trying to forget that last line. Now go buy the book and discover for yourself why Joshua Mehigan is already a poet for the ages.

Good contemporary poetry--a rare and wonderful thing!

What a pleasant surprise to find new poetry that is carefully crafted, intelligent, and genuinely moving. If only more poets writing today took their craft as seriously. I hope Mehigan is working on a second book!

Dark and Edgy

Optimism means the tendency to hope for the best. It is possible that Joshua Mehigan wrote this book hoping that it would be liked by many. So far, many critics have enjoyed this book. He uses violence and cruelty, and adds in a sense of humor. His writing in brilliant and he is extremely talented. Although his work portrays some violence and cruelty, his work qualifies as mysterious. The word optimist meaning a hope for the best coincides with his work. Possibly, when writing about "A Questionable Mother" or "Last Chance at Reconciliation", the hope was that the mothers daughter would be found or that reconciliation could be a factor for this certain man. These two are not only the two poems that deal with hope. They all do in some way. The Optimist contains poems on different subjects such as the weather, a house fire, noise pollution, murder, suicide, love, ideal love and reconciliation. These poems contain themes such as suicide and death. "An Ideal Passion" almost seems like a poem about a guy who is stalking this woman. He loves this woman whom he can not have and dreams of her. The poem "Riddle" is set up as a riddle. It leaves the reader to figure out what exactly the poet is talking about or of whom. "The Murder" had a deep impact on myself as the reader. The last line "The way to a woman's heart is through her chest" left me uneasy. "Post Partum" deals with depression after the birth of a baby. I would recommend that everyone take the time to read Joshua Mehigans book. He converts deep emotion into powerful art. The language he uses creates power over the reader, that one can't help but keep reading. This book overall, was very good. It is the first of many to come.

An astonishing (perhaps great?) debut

Had we a genuine literary culture I believe The Optimist, the debut collection of Joshua Mehigan, would enjoy the reception accorded Delmore Schwartz's "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" in 1938. These are poems of expressive, never hide-bound formality. In "A Questionable Mother" the realization that every perfectly modulated line of blank verse has a feminine ending can make one laugh out loud, yet also, together with the ghost of a refrain, contributes to a growing unease. "Promenade" furnishes Mehigan with a hilarious excuse for an overripe rhetoric, as it appears to be a dramatic monologue for a fatuous, middle-aged bachelor, ending on a beautiful, nonsense mock-aphorism. This poem's companion piece could be the brilliant "Another Pygmalion". Both evince the poet's eclat, somehow reckless and modest at the same time. "Promenade" is written in rhyming couplets, yet so sinuously and with such a sure touch at enjambment that the effect is rather peekaboo than Pope and "Another Pygmalion" although printed in a solid block reveals itself to be written in perfect, albeit run-over, terza rima. "A Bird at the Leather Mill" has the eerie quality of a parable by Kierkegaard or Kafka. "Buzzards" feels like it may have its origin in family anecdote, but also reminds this reader of the underappreciated metaphysical lyrics of Leonie Adams. In this poem and many others he can be moving, "In the Home of my Sitter", "The Optimist", "Introduction to Poetry" among them. That Mr. Mehigan can write such tender, bitter, ruefully comic scenes of upstate New York working-class life and also write very good poems with titles such as "Imperative of the Minor Florentine Chapel" and "Alexandra", about a fourth century anchoress, testifies to his range. The collection's title may seem sarcastic after so many cynical chuckles, but after closing this book on the lovely "Merrily", I am reminded that stoicism and existentialism are positive philosophies. I have a personal ascending scale for poetic worth. These poems are worth reading, rereading, memorizing, and then repeating.