The writers whose work most resembles James Mulhern’s — each set beside a line from his own poems and stories, with a note on what the comparison reveals.
In the course of close reading — and repeatedly in AI-assisted analysis through Perplexity — the same affinities kept surfacing: Mulhern’s work placed beside Flannery O’Connor, James Joyce, Raymond Carver, and others. This page gathers those resemblances, setting a line from each writer beside a line from Mulhern, so the kinship can be seen rather than merely asserted.
Resemblance is not equivalence. To be placed beside a great writer is not to be that writer; it is only to share, in some small way, a habit of attention. These affinities are offered as a reader’s observation, not as a claim of equal stature.
Flannery O’Connor
1925 – 1964
The comic-grotesque; the profane grandmother; grace delivered through violence.
“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 writers place a grandmother at the hinge of comedy and horror. O’Connor’s grandmother is shot by the Misfit; Mulhern’s Nonna stirs poison into a dish with the same domestic tenderness with which she bakes. In both, the grotesque is not a distortion of the ordinary but its truest face — and grace, when it arrives, comes through the very violence that ought to exclude it.
James Joyce
1882 – 1941
The Irish epiphany; the everyday made luminous.
“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”
Both writers find the epiphany not in revelation but in the ordinary — a snowfall, a hand on a wall. Joyce’s snow falls on the living and the dead alike; Mulhern’s speaker touches the wall his great-uncle touched and watches him “move from darkness into light.” The Irish inheritance is the same: the dead are never quite gone, and the everyday is the only place the sacred can be found.
Raymond Carver
1938 – 1988
Minimalism; the flat report that carries the feeling.
“It was a small, good thing.”
Raymond Carver, “A Small, Good Thing”
“Mostly, he slept. Sometimes he asked the time. I left at nine.”
James Mulhern, “Copacetic”
Both writers trust understatement to do the work of grief. Carver’s baker offers bread as the only answer to a child’s death; Mulhern’s speaker records the hour he left the hospital without a word of feeling. The restraint is not coldness but measurement — the gap between the size of the wound and the size of the sentence is where the emotion is kept.
Seamus Heaney
1939 – 2013
Irish memory; the hand as the instrument of inheritance.
“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 pen rests “snug as a gun” beside the spade his father dug with; the poem honors labor through a different instrument. Mulhern’s speaker keeps a photograph of his father’s hands on his shoulders — “one moment, framed” — as the evidence of a love that was never spoken. Both writers know that what passes between generations passes through the hands, and that memory is a physical act.
Emily Dickinson
1830 – 1886
The slant of light; the resonance left unpressed.
“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 it never explains; Mulhern’s grandfather’s “blue eyes lit by a slant of kitchen sun” does the same. Any reader who wishes to hear Dickinson behind the line is free to — and the poem neither invites nor forbids it. That tact is the shared inheritance: the resonance is placed within reach and then left alone.
T. S. Eliot
1888 – 1965
The objective correlative; grief 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 formula names what Mulhern’s poems practice. The word grief never appears in the poems of Crossings; instead there is a robe folded on a table, a photograph propped by a casket, a print shattered on a floor. The emotion is not declared but reached for, through the specific object that has witnessed it. Eliot supplied the theory; the poems supply the proof.
Walt Whitman
1819 – 1892
The levelled catalogue; nothing too small to be kept.
“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 give the same grammatical weight to the grand and the humble; Mulhern’s “To Be” places Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and a lost sock under a couch in the same syntactic rank. Both are acts of democratic attention — the conviction that nothing is too small to be kept, and that a list, honestly made, is a form of praise.
Alice Munro
1931 – 2024
The gap; the unspoken that carries the story.
“I like gaps; all my stories have gaps. It seems this is the way people’s lives present themselves.”
Alice Munro, in conversation
“She looked out the window and sighed.”
James Mulhern, “Shoes”
Munro builds her stories out of what is left out; Mulhern’s poems do the same. After the grandmother explains why her toes are crooked, the poem gives her a window rather than a reflection — “She looked out the window and sighed” — and the speaker supplies what she may be seeing, without asking. The gap between generations is not bridged but honored. Both writers understand that the most important thing in a story is often the thing that is never said.
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