Optimist: Poems [Paperback]

Joshua Mehigan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 15, 2004

Nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, 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. There are echoes in The Optimist of Frost, Robinson, Kees, and Justice; and more in terms of point of view, Bishop and Jarrell. 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.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Something of the energy, the savagery and emotional fierceness of Robert Lowell's early poems are to be found in this impressive book by Joshua Mehigan. These poems are often wound tight as spring, and are concentrations of violent feelings and visions of cruelty, yet uttered in a language quietly brilliant, as well as undeniably powerful."—Anthony Hecht --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From the Publisher

In Joshua Mehigan’s award-winning poems, 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.

In choosing this book for the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, final judge James Cummins, wrote:

"Mehigan accesses a tradition of voices . . . 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, infuse his line with what the best verse, metrical or free, must have: wonder." --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 72 pages
• Publisher: Ohio University Press; 1 edition (December 15, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 082141612X
• ISBN-13: 978-0821416129
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 6.2 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,288,804 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An astonishing (perhaps great?) debut, February 5, 2005

By 

Thomas F. Stoelker - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Optimist: Poems (Paperback)

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.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Eerily Right, November 16, 2007

By 

Kevin Durkin - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Optimist: Poems (Paperback)

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.

4.0 out of 5 stars quite good, July 30, 2009

By 

[e-mail] "[e-mail]" (Beaumont, tx USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Optimist: Poems (Paperback)

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.