Review by Mid-American Review
Volume: XXV, NO. 2, 2005
pp. 201-202
At first, the title of Joshua Mehigan's first collection of poems may seem sarcastic. The Optimist, selected as a 2004 Big Ten Pick by ForeWord Magazine and the winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, is full of darkness. Most of the poems encapsulate ministories that take the reader inside such situations as the act of aging, a dead marriage, or a nightmare. There is a certain violence to many of these poems, including "The Murder," "The Riddle," and "The Suicide," while other poems, such as "The Umbrella Man" and "Runaway Daughter," leave the reader with wonderfully disturbing uncertainty about whether what she's just read is actually sweet or eerie. This violence, whether subtle or overt, is at times accompanied by the element of surprise, though the morbid humor of lines such as "Home, they all cried, is not where you hang your hat./Home is where you hang yourself they said," and "The way to a woman's heart is through her chest." There is, however, also beauty in the pages of The Optimist, a startling beauty that is hard to resist and keeps the reader coming back for more, because, as Mehigan writes, "Pain shines a little" and "hope [is] an addiction."
One of the major pleasures of reading this book is becoming absorbed in Mehigan's mastery of formal craft. Throughout The Optimist he plays with form and meter. Additionally, virtually every poem in the collection employs smooth and often subtle rhyme. One of the most impressive instances of rhyme is in the poem "War Dims Hopes for Peace," in which he manages to create a rather natural series of standard rhymed quatrains using only unaltered news headlines that appeared between September 11 and September 14, 2001.
Mehigan's dedication to form and rhyme does not distract from the content of this fearless first book. He captures the reader right away with such opening lines as "The fire transformed the bedspread into fire," from "The Spectacle," and holds onto them with such metaphors as "between a half-dreamt porch and headlight glare,/ love lowered its muzzled head, growled in defeat,/ and dragged its chain across the bottom stair" from "If Ye Find My Beloved?." Yet, in the best possible way, he shows us exactly what we need to know, and nothing more. In my opinion, this is a sign of an incredibly promising writer, one who knows that "wisdom lies...in what remains unsaid."
It is clear that Mehigan utilizes this unspoken wisdom to effectively heighten the power of what he does, quite carefully, choose to put on the page. He demonstrates an intense poetic craftsmanship, as well as a steady courage, or obsessive need, to explore the dark even without a sure promise of hope. This, itself, is enlightening. Mehigan's poetry doesn't seem to set out to find and the vehemently endorse a bright hope, nor does it seem to set out to finally and completely disqualify optimism. Rather, the reader gets a sense that there is a strange hope (perhaps the only real hope) in being able to embrace and find beauty in the honesty of the dark. In "Déjá vu," Mehigan writes, "the children cried, or sang," but this powerful first book, The Optimist, shows us that often the two are one and the same.
Mid-American Review
Vol. XXV, No. 2
2005
