Critics and reviewers have heard other writers in James Mulhern’s poems and stories. These notes follow where their readings lead.
Pine Street, Rainafter Edward Hopper
Each pairing below marks a single point of contact: a grandmother at the center of a story, a grief carried in plain sentences, a feeling left in an object.
Flannery O’Connor
1925 – 1964
A grandmother at the center; comedy set close to danger.
She would of been a good woman . . . if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.
Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”
“Sure, mia bambina. What’s one more ingredient? Not a problem.”
James Mulhern, “Mia Bambina”
Both stories give a grandmother a central and unsettling role. O’Connor’s grandmother talks her family toward the Misfit; in “Mia Bambina,” Agnella answers a child’s request for “one more ingredient” in the same cheerful voice she uses for baking. Both set a kitchen voice close to danger.
James Joyce
1882 – 1941
The dead felt close at hand; light at the close.
His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
James Joyce, “The Dead”
I press my palm against the homestead wall, as you touched my head so many years ago. I see you move from darkness into light.
James Mulhern, “Dark City”
Joyce’s snow falls “upon all the living and the dead”; at the end of “Dark City,” the speaker presses his palm against the wall of his grandfather’s homestead in Ireland and sees him “move from darkness into light.” Both passages close with the dead seeming near, a gesture Joyce made famous in one of the summits of the short story.
Raymond Carver
1938 – 1988
Plain sentences; feeling left unstated.
“Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this.”
Raymond Carver, “A Small, Good Thing”
Mostly, he slept. Sometimes he asked the time. I left at nine.
James Mulhern, “Copacetic”
In Carver’s story, a baker offers bread to grieving parents; in “Copacetic,” the speaker reports a hospital vigil in short, plain sentences. Both passages let understatement carry the grief. The poem works in a similarly plain style.
Taken together. O’Connor, Joyce, and Carver are honored here for particular gifts: O’Connor for comedy set close to danger, Joyce for the dead who seem near, Carver for the plain sentence. Each of them did far more than the single habit noted here.
Seamus Heaney
1939 – 2013
Family memory kept through the hands.
Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Seamus Heaney, “Digging”
Your hands on my shoulders. One moment, framed.
James Mulhern, “The Crosswalk”
Heaney’s speaker holds a pen where his father and grandfather held spades. The speaker of “The Crosswalk” remembers a photograph of his father’s hands on his shoulders, set on the table by the casket—“one moment, framed.” Both poems remember a parent through the hands.
Emily Dickinson
1830 – 1886
A slant of light; an echo left open.
There’s a certain Slant of light, / Winter Afternoons—/ That oppresses, like the Heft / Of Cathedral Tunes—
Emily Dickinson, “There’s a certain Slant of light”
blue eyes lit by a slant of kitchen sun
James Mulhern, “Dark City”
Dickinson’s “certain Slant of light” carries a weight she does not explain. In “Dark City,” a remembered face has “blue eyes lit by a slant of kitchen sun.” The word “slant” recalls Dickinson; the poem leaves that echo open without leaning on it.
T. S. Eliot
1888 – 1965
Feeling held in objects.
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion.
T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems”
His robe, folded, on the table by the door.
James Mulhern, “Copacetic”
Eliot’s term offers one useful way to describe how “Copacetic” ends: not with a statement of grief but with a robe folded on a table. Other poems in Crossings work in a similar way, through a photograph by a casket or a broken print of the Last Supper. The term is borrowed here as a tool for reading.
Walt Whitman
1819 – 1892
Grand and humble things listed together.
I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume . . .
Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
“the Wife of Bath’s scarlet stockings” . . . “a flattened sneaker on some highway” . . . “a lost sock under a sagging couch”
James Mulhern, “To Be”
Whitman’s catalogues set large and small things side by side. In “To Be,” the speaker’s list of things he would like to be runs from the Wife of Bath’s scarlet stockings to a lost sock under a couch. The poem is brief and quiet where Whitman is vast.
Alice Munro
1931 – 2024
What goes unsaid.
I like gaps, all my stories have gaps.
Alice Munro, as quoted from an interview with the Guardian
She looked out the window and sighed.
James Mulhern, “Shoes”
Munro spoke of the gaps in her stories. In “Shoes,” after the grandmother explains her crooked toes, the poem gives her only a window and a sigh, and the speaker imagines what she may be seeing. The likeness is a shared trust in what goes unsaid; Munro built whole stories that way, and the poem uses it for a single moment.
