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