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"...I had developed come to learn that the executing that my father did got less to do with what was done to the deceased and more to do with the particular living does about the actual fact of life that individuals perished," Thomas Lynch muses in his preface to The Starting. The identical could be said for Lynch's publication: ostensibly about fatality and its attendant rituals, The Starting is in the end about life. In each circumstance, he writes, it is the one that gives so this means to the other. A funeral director in Milford, Michigan, Lynch is that strangest of hyphenates, a poet-undertaker, but corresponding to Lynch, all poets talk about his occupation, "looking for so this means and voices in life and love and fatality." Looking for meaning will take him to all sorts of unpredicted places, both real and imagined. He embalms your body of his own father, celebrates the rebuilt bridge to his town's old cemetery, will take issue with the Jessica Mitfords of this world, and envisages a "golfatorium," a combo golf course and cemetery that can restore delight to the previous rites. In "Crapper," Lynch even contemplates the subtleties of the present day flush toilet and its romantic relationship to the messy business of dying: "Nearly enough time we were having the making of water and the movements of bowels in to the house, we were pressing the birthing and marriage and sickness and dying away." Death and fatherhood, fatality and friendship, fatality and trust and love and poetry--these will be the concerns that electric power Lynch's executing. Throughout, Lynch pleads the case for our dead--who are, in the end, still living through us--with an eloquence marked by equivalent parts whimsy, wit, and compassion. Within the last essay, "Tract," he envisions almost wistfully the funeral he'd choose for himself, and then relinquishes that, too. Funerals, in the end, are for the living. The deceased, he reminds us, don't caution.
