Still Life in Milford: Poems - Tapa dura

Poems include meditations in a London park, modern turns on Gregorian chants, and thoughts on life, death, memory, and history.

In his first American collection since 1987, Thomas Lynch tenders poems on life and death, history and memory, the local and the larger geographies. From Latin wellsprings in Gregorian hymns, through inherited idioms of West Clare and meditations in a London park, to the plainchants of middle America, Lynch follows the forces of language. The ordinary artifacts of daily life and common speech are assembled into poems of uncommon elegance and grace.

Colloquy and narrative, soliloquy and tribute: Still Life in Milford engages the full register of the poet's voices -- as elegist, witness, obituarist, straight-man, and passerby -- to achieve a disturbing and instructive harmony.