Amazon.com Review
Still Life in Milford is--perhaps unsurprisingly--haunted by death. Its author, after all, is that most celebrated of poet-undertakers, Thomas Lynch of Milford, Michigan. Evidently poetry and undertaking are felicitous occupations for one obsessed with the larger questions, and Lynch finds abundant material in the vacant eyes of corpses, in the pages of small-town obituaries, even in the autopsy notes from Dr. Kevorkian's patients. Yet throughout, Lynch maintains a sturdy, undertaker's stoicism in the face of the cruelest ironies death has to offer. After all, he has "certain duties here. Notably, / when folks get horizontal, breathless, still: / life in Milford ends. They call. I send a car."
In some ways, Lynch holds a pleasingly old-fashioned view of "the human hunger for creation": "the act of ordering is all the same--" he writes in the collection's title poem, "the ordinary becomes a celebration." And he does nothing if not celebrate the ordinary: small-town life, marriage, his Irish relations' hardscrabble lives. Yet beyond these poems' orderly surfaces lies chaos. Writing about a fatal car accident in "That Scream if You Ever Hear It," he addresses an (imaginary? internal?) critic, the one who tells him, "Rub their noses in it."
I know you don't need symmetry or order
so that the biker died in pieces--
the arm with the tattoo reading SHIT
HAPPENS thrown a hundred yards from the one
with NO TOMORROW on it--doesn't impress you.
What will impress, he concludes, is that the bereaved mother's scream, when it finally emerges, "won't rhyme with anything." Faced with the unthinkable, Lynch can only shrug, bury the body, do his job as both poet and undertaker: "And if rhyming's out of fashion, I fashion rhymes / that keep their distance, four lines apart, like so."
--Mary Park
From Library Journal
Lynch first came to our attention in 1987 with Skating with Heather Grace (LJ 3/1/87), an extraordinary book about ordinary life that spoke quietly and directly to readers. Since then, he has distinguished himself with the award-winning The Undertaking, a fine account that expands on his profession as a funeral director. That job clearly gives one time to consider issues of faith and mortality, and it's not surprising that the poems in this strong new collection deal largely with just such issues. Here, Lynch recalls his religious upbringing while considering "the problem of evil" and trying to maintain his equilibrium when faced with "another heartsore Friday full of sun." As he muses in one poem, "I had a nunnish upbringing. I served/ six-twenty Mass on weekdays for a priest/ who taught me...to keep/ a running tally of the things I'd done/ against the little voice in me the nuns/ were always saying I should listen to." These poems are undeniably?and understandably?dark-toned, but they make you think. For all poetry collections.?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
