Mehigan is one of America's most gifted formalists, and as his title indicates, his sensibility is not a sunny one—rarely have so many people bought the farm in iambic pentameter. But this is an observation, not a criticism, and 'The Orange Bottle,' in particular, gives new life to tired compliment 'tour de force.'” —David Orr, The New York Times Book Review
“Joshua Mehigan is well known to readers who follow contemporary poets, but his Accepting the Disaster is the rare poetry book that could bring a lot of pleasure to a much broader audience. Although Mehigan is a master of formal elements, his poems also display a deep human understanding—of work, of small-town life, of mortality and suffering—that makes them feel not just impressive but trustworthy.” —Adam Kirsch, The New York Times Book Review
“Joshua Mehigan's second collection, Accepting the Disaster, is an ominous, sometimes terrifying book. Mehigan's poems are expertly crafted, often lyrical and subtly steeped in dread; at times they appear to look at contemporary America in their rear-view mirror, dissecting an era where 'nothing ever changes till it does' with the sort of authority only hindsight ordinarily affords . . . At times angry, often sorrowful, Joshua Mehigan is not entirely hopeless, if only because 'joy even now / might sometimes visit as it used to.' In the title poem, 'Trying to say what it was like is like / trying to teach the blind what darkness is'; that is what these poems do with patience and skill, in a world where an omen can be 'like a gift, or like bait.'” —Declan Ryan, The Times Literary Supplement
“The book I most looked forward to getting my hands on this year was Joshua Mehigan’s second collection, Accepting the Disaster. This is, poem after poem, one of the best volumes of recent years. Comparisons have been made to Philip Larkin—Mehigan has a way with rhyme and meter, and his pessimism is as dark as industrial sludge. If deprivation was, for Larkin, what daffodils were for Wordsworth, for Mehigan, it’s brownfields and smoke stacks. I’d add Edwin Arlington Robinson to his influences, for the deft portraits, and the first-person plural that functions both as the neighbourhood and tragic chorus.” —A. E. Stallings, Times Literary Supplement
“Accepting the Disaster is a book that anyone who reads poetry should read; I suspect we will be reading it for a very long time to come.” —Adam Kirsch, The New Republic
“At nearly every turn Joshua Mehigan makes the right choices—imaginatively and formally—in his exciting new collection Accepting the Disaster. And they're choices that could never be anticipated—uncanny, really, and thoroughly invigorating. Surprise and inevitability, that is the mark of a first-rate artist, and Mehigan is nothing if not that: breadth of intelligence, freshness of invention, skill at the wheel are everywhere to be found in these pages. The man's got it, in spades.” —August Kleinzahler, author of Hotel Oneira
“These poems are built to last, and they will. It's the beautiful authority of the writing and its music, and of the deep disinterested pity and respect for these people and their things and places, poem after wonderful poem. The uncanny great poem ‘The Sponge,' and, say, ‘The Cement Plant,' ‘The Polling Place' and ‘The Smokestack,' and that amazing tour de force title poem are just instances, how strange, how sweet, of the mastery.” —David Ferry, National Book Award-winning author of Bewildermen
05/01/2014
In his second collection (after 2004's The Optimist), Mehigan casts a clear if wearied eye at the near world, focusing on sites found in any American town: a polling place, a homeless shelter, a factory. It's a dispirited universe of ringing pay phones no one will answer, stifled workers in boring jobs ("This fastening, unfastening, and heaving—/ this is our life"), and schoolchildren taught "not to be but to behave." Mehigan's rhymes and terse metrics may echo Dickinson's and approximate a Larkinesque register of well-crafted glum, but he sometimes slips into simplistic versifying ("The town had a smokestack./ It had a church spire./ The church was prettier,/ but the smokestack was higher") and betrays a tendency to state the obvious. "The Library" ends: "Inside were many things I'll never know." "The Professor" reveals "Everything I know is from a book." And do we need to be told so flatly that "No one is special. We grow old. We die"? VERDICT Easy to read and comprehend, Mehigan's poems will please many, particularly those who feel contemporary poetry has abandoned them, but others will wish that the poet's imaginative reach more consistently matched his technical skill.—Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY
