Poetry Review of The Optimist
June, 2005
A work of some poise and finish, by turns delicate and robust, making balanced use of the imposing and receptive facets of intelligence, The Optimist is by some margin the best book in this roundup. It's not innovative, but what it does, it does well and very consistently. Mehigan writes with the alert quality control and tonal competence of mid-century Americans like Edgar Bowers (to whom one poem is dedicated) and Richard Eberhart. He can write very unobtrusively in tight form (consider the line "Something exceptional will happen now"). He has exquisite tact, in the sense of balancing the reader's confusion against the poems' dependence on mystery. He also has a trait crucial to successful poets, but which I don't think we have a name for: a profound sincerity of interest that justifies profligate attention to anyone and anything, especially the minor and "objectively" unimportant. This sincerity allows Mehigan to inhabit the nooks and crannies of quiet (and not so quiet) domestic scenes, the idle hours of distressed or twilight figures, and find poems of some density and momentousness without seeming to have forced the invention. The essential smallness of his subjects will sneak up on you like the formality of his verse: a retiree drifts through his house, a mother tries to get her thirty-year-old mentally retarded son to put his shoes on, gullible farmers line up for a carnival game, a crane wanders onto the floor of a leather mill ("It wore its wings as though they were a shawl / thrown on an idiot"). An umbrella vendor watches patiently over a rush of pedestrains in a spring drizzle
because he seeks the one he knows will come:
one always just about to turn the corner,
blushing, and misty-faced, and misty-haired,
skirting the storefronts, beautifully bereft,
who has left home this morning unprepared.
–From The Umbrella Man
To a remarkable degree the poems sustain this appealing combination of good manners and underlying hunger.
Eavan Boland has pointed out that, our talent promotion mechanism being inept, poets' first books today are liable to resemble, in their level of development, the second and even third books of a couple of generations ago. The Optimist has very few burrs on it, does not feel like a debut, and I suspect that Mehigan, thirty-five, has a couple of manuscripts in his desk we will never see. Nevertheless, we have a lot to look forward to. This is a poet with absolutely no reliance on madness or on romantic mismatch between himself and the world, and he should, at the very least, be able to keep doing what he's doing as impressively as he has been doing it, which is awfully impressively.
Poetry
June 2005
