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The Optimist: Poems (Hollis Summers Poetry Prize) Paperback – May 10, 2005
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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.”
- Print length61 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherOhio University Press
- Publication dateMay 10, 2005
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.3 x 8.5 inches
- ISBN-10082141612X
- ISBN-13978-0821416129
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“This book is a remarkable achievement.”—John Hollander
“Something of the energy, the savagery and emotional fierceness of Robert Lowells 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
“The Optimist, by Joshua Mehigan, is remarkable for its mastery of form and of tone. Mr. Mehigan is Frost-like in the way he plays speech rhythms against the patters of verse, creating a tense, deceptively simple music….”—Adam Kirsch, New York Sun
“One of the major pleasures of reading this book is becoming absorbed in Mehigan’s mastery of formal craft…. In the best possible way, he shows us exactly what we need to see or 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.‘“—Mid-American Review
There is more insight into domestic grief in these and other poems in The Optimist than in a dozen louder, more overtly confessional books. And that sense of insight born from experience is what makes Mehigan’s work so moving and impressive. Few American poets, old or young, seem to know so much.”―Contemporary Poetry Review
About the Author
Joshua Mehigan was born in upstate New York in 1969. Since 1993 he has lived in New York City and worked as an editor and English teacher. Published in many journals, including the Chattahoochee Review, Dogwood, The Formalist, Pequod, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Sewanee Review, and Verse, his poems and translations are also forthcoming in anthologies from Word Press and Zoo Press. His poems have won the Dogwood Poetry Contest and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Product details
- Publisher : Ohio University Press; 1st edition (May 10, 2005)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 61 pages
- ISBN-10 : 082141612X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0821416129
- Item Weight : 3.81 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.3 x 8.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,855,124 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #7,162 in American Poetry (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
![Joshua Mehigan](https://cdn.statically.io/img/m.media-amazon.com/images/S/amzn-author-media-prod/jl0e037rnsqng2f04bnpu0bpjs._SY600_.jpg)
Joshua Mehigan’s first book, The Optimist (Ohio UP), was a finalist for the 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry and winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. His second book, Accepting the Disaster, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in July 2014.
Mehigan’s poems have appeared in many periodicals, including The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Poetry, which awarded him its 2013 Levinson Prize. His writing has also been featured on Poetry Daily and The Writer’s Almanac, and in anthologies such as Poetry: A Pocket Anthology (Penguin) and Bright Wings (Columbia UP). Translations of his poems by Christophe Fricker have appeared in various German periodicals, including Akzente and Krachkultur.
In 2011, Mehigan was awarded Poetry magazine’s Editors Prize for best feature article of the year, and was also the recipient of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Born in upstate New York in 1969, he has lived for the past twenty-five years in New York City.
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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.
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.
"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.