POETRY: The Sin-eater: A Breviary, By Thomas Lynch, with photographs by Michael Lynch Salmon Poetry, 81pp. €12

FOR “many bereaved Americans”, Thomas Lynch opined in a 2005 article for the New York Times, “the presence of the dead at their own funerals has become strangely unfashionable”, the prevailing trend favouring “bodiless obsequies where the finger food is good, the music transcendent . . . Here someone can be counted on to declare ‘closure’ just before the Merlot runs out”. Marketed as the “celebrated poet-undertaker” (Carlo Gébler once dubbed him the “Garrison Keillor of the undertaking trade”) the American-Irish Lynch is eminently well placed to pronounce on funerary fashions from Michigan to Moveen, and his fifth poetry collection, The Sin-eater, returns the corpse to centre stage. Unsurprisingly, finger food and fine wine are not fit fare for Argyle, the sin-eating protagonist of Lynch’s 24-poem pageant, as he works the west Clare peninsula, saving the dead from damnation by consuming bread and beer off their rotting corpses. Such a “steady diet of iniquities” causes our gutsy hero no end of stomach trouble, as in Argyle in Agony where, “gaseous and flatulent”, he resolves “to draw the line somewhere, / to leave the dirty work to younger men, / or anyway, to up his prices”. And you thought yours was a dead-end job.

Of course, cadaver-centred antics have long animated the work of modern Irish writers, from the Joycean wake to, more recently, that of Paul Muldoon, whose Maggot (2010) probes the poem as self-digesting, decomposing cadaver. Death, like sex, is always in vogue, and although Lynch undoubtedly profits from his high-novelty-value vocation (in his volume of essays Bodies in Motion and at Rest he compares his appeal to that of “a cop who sings opera . . . it makes for good copy and easy interviews”), he must also bear the burden of the more “suspect” feelings that his flair for combining the “literary and mortuary arts” routinely arouses. Argyle, as he sits “amid the whispering contempts” of his clientele, earning his wages of sin from their human losses and sceptical of the “blessed assurances and certainties” that they live by, is thereby the poet’s alter ego. It is no accident that this shadowy outcast has stalked Lynch’s poetic corpus from the beginning, having made his debut in the 1987 collection Skating with Heather Grace. Lynch’s celebrated “dismal trade” is matched by Argyle’s own “wretched work”.

Yet, as is ever the way with liminal, outlaw figures, Argyle’s peripheral position grants him an acute, humane vision. His considered ruminations make for many of the book’s liveliest, most refreshing moments, as in this rejoinder to the priest at Carrigaholt:

You do a brisk trade in indulgences

and tithes and votive lamps and

requiems.

You keep your pope and robes and host

and chalice.

Leave me my loaf and bowl and taste for

malice.

Here, the chime of “chalice” and “malice” seals the deal. That Argyle is a figure for the poet, scapegoat and sage, playful and ponderous by turns, is felt in His Ambulations as he tunes in to the connective coincidences of sound and sense that vivify the words and world in which we find (and lose) ourselves: “the way grace and gratis, wherefore gratitude / partook a kinship . . . much as grave and gravitas, then gravity . . . the humus, so-called, God wrought humans from”. In fine allegorical style Argyle’s paraclete is an ass named Recompense, and as a questioning journeyer through grey moral landscapes Argyle is not afraid to intercede, overturning the inhumanity of Catholic doctrine as he consoles the parents of a suicide: “Your boy’s no profligate or prodigal . . . only a wounded pilgrim like us all”. We are, accordingly, prodigals all, as here again the agreement of rhyme upholds the just, irrefutable truth.

Indeed, Loop Head never seemed so aptly named as Argyle moves along the circuitous, contradictory routes of our human predicament, upending rigid codes and practices in search of the more complex, contingent reality. Rhyme is revelatory, the modulating music of meaning audible through such revolving linkages as “morning”/ “mourning”; “decadent” / “decedent”; “parish” / “perish”. The fortuitous end rhyme of “mitred wankers” and “keepers of the till and tally, bankers” authoritatively marries church and commerce in unholy alliance. At times, lines stumble over their breaks and the syntax seems tortured but such rhythmic faltering is pre-emptively excused by Lynch as “imprecise pentameter” in his Introit to the collection. The poet’s lapses and labours are Argyle’s own as he wavers between “opposing forces”.

“I’ve had this problem all my life. Directing funerals,” Lynch sighs mock-despairingly in the Tract that concludes his acclaimed 1997 essay collection The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, and his directorial presence is heavily felt throughout The Sin-eater.

For, as well as being prefaced with a lengthy, this-will-explain-everything introit that tilts the balance towards sermonising prose, the poems appear alongside photographs taken by the poet’s son Michael. As with Lynch Sons, Funeral Directors, this is a family enterprise. These dull, greyscale snapshots of west of Ireland rural locales and kitschy interiors oppressively cramp the poems, boxing the reader into a narrowly focused, imaginatively impoverished space, and this despite Lynch’s precept that “a good funeral like a good poem . . . moves us up and back the cognitive and imaginative and emotive register”.

Transformative processes of metaphor and meaning – truly the vital signs of the energetic, exercised mind – should be left for the reader to divine and experience.

“I like to play euchre. He likes to play Eucharist”, Robert Frost summed up the difference between himself and TS Eliot. Lynch, a skilled yarn-spinner, should revel in the exhilarating possibilities for ambiguity and mischief-making that poetic strategies afford, relinquish overt directorial control, and allow the poems, like Argyle, to find their own way in this turning world. I, for one, look forward to savouring more of Argyle’s irreverent escapades.

Maria Johnston lectures in the school of English at Trinity College Dublin and in the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies at Mater Dei Institute