12/03/2000

By Tom Mayo

It's official: Death is everywhere around us. We have laws that tell us when it occurs, who can pronounce it and how to do the paperwork (they're called advance directives, and if your physician hasn't discussed them with you, you really should ask). Death got a big boost this fall when it received its own Bill Moyers special on PBS. And now it has a poet laureate: Thomas Lynch – father, husband, funeral director in tiny Milford, Mich., essayist, and poet.

You could have seen Thomas Lynch almost anywhere this summer. He was on all the radio and television talk shows and he probably did a signing at a bookstore near you. The occasion was the release of his latest book of essays, Bodies in Motion and at Rest (W.W. Norton $23.95), and the hoopla was justified. Mr. Lynch writes with such clarity and imagination and grace, I stopped on nearly every page to savor an image, a connection or a paragraph of staggering originality and wit. His essays are more nearly extended poems, with only the best words in only the best places, and with a unity of structure, wordcraft, logic and playfulness that is, in a word, poetic.

Beginnings in endings

Most of the essays start with his "dismal trade"; we learn much about what Jessica Mitford did and did not understand about the funeral business in her editions of The American Way of Death. But before a Lynch essay is over, he has covered a lot more of the terrain of the living: his family's battles with alcoholism, things that went wrong with his first marriage and right with his second, growing up Catholic in America in the '50s, what a boy can learn about sex and death from his father's fishing lessons.

Mr. Lynch is also a great storyteller, a fact much in evidence in this book. Here we meet old George, the cemetery sexton ("more or less in his prime, just south of sixty . . . old George seemed to have it made and except for our moving him feet first down the stairs this morning, he has everything to live for, everything"). The author gives us a welcome update on Matthew Sweeney, his hypochondriacal friend and London poet, whom we first met in The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade (W.W. Norton $12.95 paperback), an earlier collection of essays that was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1998. And we learn a little more about Mr. Lynch's great-aunt Nora, and the family homestead in Moveen, County Clare, Ireland.

All souls' days

Nora and Moveen were also part of The Undertaking, but Mr. Lynch really lets us get to know them in his collection of poems, Still Life in Milford (W.W. Norton, $21, recently reissued in paperback for $11). "The Moveen Notebook" is a long poem in the middle of the book, part family history, part sociological study, but mostly a meditation on what death teaches us about the living. The poems here are often about Mr. Lynch's trade, about funerals and burials and caskets and urns, but it's the people who need his services he really cares about, the ones who have died and those who bring him the dead. Me. You.

Undertakers come in at the end of a person's life, and the art that they bring to the enterprise lies in fashioning a response to death that helps the survivors make sense of that end (as well as that life, and, therefore, the survivors' own lives). Perhaps that is why Mr. Lynch saves the tours de force in both books until the end. In Bodies he starts his final essay at the slots in Reno and soon is making a compelling and persuasive argument that poets and undertakers are in pretty much the same line of work and use basically the same techniques. The last poem in Still Life in Milford is the title poem, an exploration of the almost endless shadings of meaning in the phrase "still life," an exercise that actually starts with the title of the book and the introductory quotations and continues through the last words of the final endnote. Both "Reno" and "Still Life in Milford" also illustrate another of Mr. Lynch's recurring themes: the life-affirming and sometimes redemptive power of art in the daily lives of ordinary people.

As I read both books, one thought kept coming back to me. Then, when I got to Mr. Lynch's comments on Seamus Heaney, that thought found the words to describe it: "It is good to be alive while this man is writing."

Tom Mayo, an associate professor of law at Southern Methodist University, teaches "Law, Literature & Medicine" at the law school and at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School at Dallas.