Mehigan Returns

Joshua Mehigan is a deliberate poet. “I’m the least prolific writer I know,” he once said in an article for Poetry. The ten-year gap between his first collection, The Optimist, and this second collection, Accepting the Disaster, however, seems wholly justified. The craftsmanship in each poem is exceptional, and it’s apparent how much Mehigan has grown as a poet. While The Optimist can feel imitative as well as brilliant, Mehigan’s voice in Accepting the Disaster is sure and possesses a disarming restraint.

Mehigan’s use of form in Accepting the Disaster is, to say the least, extraordinary. His subtlety in rhyme and meter is unparalleled; though he often writes with end-stopped lines and exact, often monosyllabic, rhymes, his verse never sounds forced. Instead the forms Mehigan employs—sonnets, triolets, ballads etc.—complement and enliven his distinctly low-key register, rather than usurp it. Take the second quatrain of “Here,” the first poem in the collection and a perfect Petrarchan sonnet:

It is the same no matter where you go,and downtown you will find no big surprises.Each fall the dew point falls until it rises.White snow, green buds, green lawn, red leaves, white snow.

The understated music of these rhymes is exquisite, despite the strict adherence to formal constraints. The rhyme of “surprises” and “rises” is delightful, and the return to “white snow” at the end of the last line is a stroke of genius. It is Mehigan’s fidelity to common speech patterns that allows him to speak in strict and musical meter without his verses sounding elevated. A line like “Each fall the dew point falls until it rises” is entirely conversational, yet contains a sublime music that is all the more potent for its subtlety.

One of Mehigan’s greatest assets in this collection is his mastery of the single line. He is as deeply engaged with the music and logic of a line as Frost or Larkin, and his interplay with line and sentence is always purposeful. This is evident in the triolet, “The Crossroads,” which is entirely end-stopped with periods.

This is the place it happened. It was here.You might not know it was unless you knew.All day the cars blow past and disappear.This is the place it happened. It was here.

The repetition of “This is the place it happened. It was here” haunts the poem with obsession and grief, and yet it refuses to name the tragedy behind the emotion. Such simplicity and restraint are provocative. Which is not to say Mehigan layers his verse with intentional ambiguities—intending to puzzle the reader into awe—but rather that his control of craft extends not only to what he says, but to what he refuses to say.

As with his language, Mehigan treats his subjects with empathy and patience. The subjects of this collection are almost all gritty, industrial, even ugly, and yet the deliberation in his lyricism allows their strange beauty to shine through. Like an Edward Hopper painting of a gas station, Mehigan uncovers the fascinating and oddly human quiddity of his subjects in poems like “The Smokestack,” “The Polling Place,” and “Joe Pipe.” The latter poem concerns a homeless man who adorns himself with a black cowboy hat, black boots, and a toy pipe in order to salvage a sense of masculinity in a world that refuses him such an identity:

    Good if that man,who would have no spouse or car,could feel that a toy, alongwith the clothes and the boots that he wore,made him like other men.Also, he was not wrong.

That last line is deeply moving, and entirely unexpected. The collection is peppered with such moments of surprise. There is a constant—though sober—sense of discovery in these poems, a distinct quality that only comes about with time and labor. Mehigan has given both to his poetry, and the result is that it pulses with life and physicality.

Accepting the Disaster finds Mehigan exercising a true understanding of...