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    The Optimist: Poems
    The Optimist: Poems
    The Optimist: Poems
    Ebook69 pages28 minutes

    The Optimist: Poems

    By Joshua Mehigan

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    About this ebook

    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.”

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOhio University Press
    Release dateMay 10, 2005
    ISBN9780821441329
    The Optimist: Poems
    Author

    Joshua Mehigan

    Joshua Mehigan’s first book, The Optimist, was a finalist for the 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared in periodicals including The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Poetry, where he has been a frequent contributor of poems and essays. His writing has also been featured on Poetry Daily and The Writer’s Almanac, and in numerous anthologies. He is the recent recipient of Poetry magazine’s Editor’s Prize for Feature Article, and of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Mehigan lives in New York City.

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      Book preview

      The Optimist - Joshua Mehigan

      I

      Promenade

      Bowne Park, Queens. Labor Day morning. A man stumbles across a wedding.

      This is the brief departure from the norm

      that celebrates the norm. The wind is warm

      and constant through the field set at the heart

      of the impervious borough, yet apart.

      This day and this place, born from other days

      and places as a parenthetic phrase,

      and this sky, where a businessman may write

      the purposeless, brief beauty of a kite,

      are like the possibilities of love.

      The kite leaps up, rasps fifty feet above

      until it is almost unusual,

      and fastens there. The wind’s predictable

      but private method with it sets it free

      to dive toward greater plausibility

      and finish its digression in the wide

      municipal burlesque of countryside.

      What distantly appear to be festoons

      of white, white bunting, trefoils of balloons

      in white, improve the black affectless trees

      where three girls stand like caryatides

      patiently holding crepe bells to a bough.

      Something exceptional will happen now.

      But first the fat, black, windswept frock will swerve

      past the buffet to steal one more hors d’oeuvre.

      He floats like an umbrella back to where

      his book is, smoothes his robe, and smoothes his hair.

      Yellow grass undulates beneath the breeze.

      Couples file through the corridor of trees

      toward rows of folding seats. Bridesmaids unhook

      from groomsmen’s arms. 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.

      Two New Fish

      Inside the knotted plastic bag he tossed

      and caught in front of him the whole way home

      were two new fish. They seemed to him to bear

      a trademark not quite rare, as though the two

      were penknife souvenirs from the next county.

      The fish were alien and mediocre.

      He felt his strength as if it were a bomb

      that detonates with no complexity

      of wires or clocks, fuse or even impact.

      His tosses changed without much thought to heaves.

      They arced, slowed, hung like miniature flames

      trapped in a bubble, glanced the power lines . . .

      The fish sped back an inch and forth an inch

      in the bag cupped in the boy’s hands, and

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