Still Life in Milford

Thomas Lynch's Still Life in Milford is an impressive addition to a body of work already noted for its rich, humane recording of "the everyday mysteries" of life and its passing. Beginning with a meditation on the closeness and intimacy between art and memory, life and death, Lynch pursues these themes through colloquy and narrative, soliloquy and tribute. "Recollections of / the dead, the dying and the grown or gone" dominate the book, as do reflections on how the "ineluctable modalities" of the dead remain as presences in "the lives we live" ("Morveen Notebook").

Adapting stories from his life as undertaker in Milford, Michigan, and painful personal testimony, Lynch--without irony--questions the use of contrived word and ritual in our denials of death and the dead. Rarely sentimental, these poems are particularly evocative when questioning the power, privilege, and legitimacy of poetry to ever come face to face with grief without falling into a stylised, elegiac formula for denoting how the dead are remembered. Acknowledging, in one poem that "love and grieving share the one body", Lynch is also disturbingly precise about the deepest, most private, unsayable conversations we have with the dead which "leave the heart broken" ("Iambs for the Day of Burial").--David Marriott


Genre: Children's Fiction