{"id":4476,"date":"2014-12-15T05:10:51","date_gmt":"2014-12-15T05:10:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=4476"},"modified":"2016-01-23T16:31:21","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T15:31:21","slug":"gluck-and-mehigan-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=4476","title":{"rendered":"New Collections from Louise Gl\u00fcck and Joshua Mehigan, reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"

Louise Gl\u00fcck Faithful and Virtuous Night<\/em> (Carcanet Press) \u00a39.95
\nJoshua Mehigan Accepting the Disaster <\/em>(Farrar, Strauss and Giroux) $23.00<\/p>\n

Louise Gl\u00fcck has an astonishing record in the US having been awarded almost every poetry prize there is. Her last book, Poems 1962-2012<\/em>, was garlanded with praise in every review it received. In the UK, this new book, Faithful and Virtuous Night<\/em>, has been shortlisted for the T.S.Eliot award. Her writing is noted for its sparse lyricism and the way it takes a scalpel to familial relationships of every kind: between children and parents, between spouses, and between siblings. Above all, poetry which might seem confessional is driven by Gl\u00fcck\u2019s intelligence and sheer intellectual reach, so the poems are very far from theatrical.<\/p>\n

In comparison, Joshua Mehigan is a relative newcomer to the American poetry scene, whose Accepting the Disaster<\/em> is his second full collection. This book, too, has received high praise. From its title, with its clear genuflection to Elizabeth Bishop, we might assume that Mehigan\u2019s poetic temperament was a kind of opposite to Gl\u00fcck\u2019s. And that is, mostly, true. Mehigan is a master of the small, closely formed lyric, although this book contains two longer narratives, \u2018The Orange Bottle\u2019 and the title poem. Mehigan is also a skilled formalist, but not, perhaps, the costive post-Hechtian classicism of the recent New-Formalism of Timothy Steele and Dana Gioia. Mehigan\u2019s formalism is more a genuflection towards the calmer forms of Robert Frost. And, while we\u2019re trading influences, British influences of such as Simon Armitage and James Fenton have been spotted here.
\nThe best of these poems offer a quiet, Frost-like openness. Here is \u2018The Library\u2019 complete:<\/p>\n

We have all been there once. Some, more than that.
\nThey forced us all to visit one September.
\nBut that was such a long, long time ago.
\nThere wasn\u2019t anything to marvel at.
\nThe door was heavy. That I still remember.
\nInside were many things I\u2019ll never know.<\/p>\n

Here, Mehigan plays the personal pronouns off, one against another. At the same time, Mehigan pulls the viewpoint in the poem centripetally into the library as a personal space. Counter to that centripetal pull is the placing of the event in a vague past, and the emptying of the place of detail. The library is \u2018such a long, long time ago\u2019; there is nothing \u2018to marvel at\u2019, and finally the narrator\u2019s knowledge is made incomplete.<\/p>\n

The definite article in the title suggests that this library may stand, metonymically, for larger perspectives. And this is a tactic Mehigan often uses, in such poems as, \u2018The Crossroads\u2019, \u2018The Hill\u2019, \u2018The Fair\u2019 and \u2018The News\u2019. And sometimes, his use of very closing endings can seal up the experiences he outlines. Elsewhere, however, Mehigan can both pour meaning into such places and derive meaning from them in ways which are empathetic to the small-town communities he describes; both reverential and celebratory.<\/p>\n

Faithful and Virtuous Night<\/em> also manages the difficult trick of being both centripetal and centrifugal. Gl\u00fcck, herself, puts it like this, \u2018I write about you all the time, I said aloud.\/Every time I say \u2018I\u2019 it refers to you.\u2019 That saying of the \u2018I\u2019 aloud, elides the writing of the \u2018I\u2019 in the poems; so, in some ways we are not nearer working out the distance between the I in the poems and the authorising consciousnesss that writes them. And, since so many of these poems are sited in a dream world; And since, in turn, that dream world itself is haunted by the reappearance of her parents, and a dead sister, we are made to see the title of the book as ultimately ironic.<\/p>\n

In the poem, \u2018Midnight\u2019, the I is surrounded by a night on which she (one so wishes to say Gl\u00fcck!) seems to float. At such a moment she is \u2018lifted above the world\/ so that action was at last impossible\u2019 but where thought is \u2018not only possible but limitless\u2019. At this point, \u2018It had no end. I did not, I felt,\/ need to do anything. Everything\/ would be done for me, or done to me,\/and if it was not done, it was not\/essential.\u2019 That sense of both consciousness and poem as a Russian doll might simply be too self-referential and irritating. But what controls the poems is Gl\u00fcck\u2019s exacting and particularising lyricism. Later in \u2018Midnight\u2019, the floating takes place on a Stygian river, with her aunt passing coins to the captain of the body that ferries her, her aunt and her brother. And on the river banks \u2018everything glittered \u2013 the stars, the bridge lights, the important\/ illumined buildings that seem to stop at the river\/ then resume again, man\u2019s work\/ interrupted by nature.\u2019 Gl\u00fcck has always had an ability to interleave the internal and the external and make those two parts of existence resonate and glisten one with another. This book only adds to the sum of the beautiful poems she has written with such poise over that glittering career.
\n 
\nIan Pople<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Louise Gl\u00fcck Faithful and Virtuous Night (Carcanet Press) \u00a39.95 Joshua Mehigan Accepting the Disaster (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux) $23.00 Louise Gl\u00fcck has an astonishing record in the US having been awarded almost every poetry prize there is. Her last book, Poems 1962-2012, was garlanded with praise in every review it received. In the UK, this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[319,318,11,317],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nNew Collections from Louise Gl\u00fcck and Joshua Mehigan, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=4476\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"New Collections from Louise Gl\u00fcck and Joshua Mehigan, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Louise Gl\u00fcck Faithful and Virtuous Night (Carcanet Press) \u00a39.95 Joshua Mehigan Accepting the Disaster (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux) $23.00 Louise Gl\u00fcck has an astonishing record in the US having been awarded almost every poetry prize there is. 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