ForeWord Magazine Review of The Optimist

November/December 2004

"Terse, tightly wound, as swift and barbed as arrows, this collection of fifty poems hits cleanly and hard. Mehigan’s title is ironic yet valid: life has given a number of his characters an emotional kick in the teeth. The retired actor of The Swan Song can “. . . enchanted with his high, tragic style, / pull down the curtains on the maudlin moon, / and crack his old arch smile,” but the timid office worker can only regret the girl seen but not known:

Each night he pictured her above his bed
Like sparks collected in the air above
A fire that burns for one late, sleepless eye.
Then in the quiet he could hear the sound
Of love, already curling up to die.

Mehigan is a master of immediacy and specificity, as in A Contract: “Their love ran out in March, their lease in June,” and his end-lines pack punch; of his short-term renter of life and love he poignantly says, “He waited now, unseen, for no one’s sake.” He is also the poet of loneliness, perfectly captured in Buzzards (... She said, 'Once, I’d take walks / to the mowed fields at noon . . . ) where the buzzards, ever detached, would “wheel and fall, then rise.”

At 35 Mehigan is unlikely to have reached his peak, but he has certainly gained an assured mastery of form. Though some may find a hint of predecessors in his work, all will note a strongly personal vision in these poems, seamlessly knit to meticulous craftsmanship."

Foreword
November/December