Bodies in Motion and at Rest
Thomas Lynch
Jonathan Cape £10, pp238

Thomas Lynch is a poet and he is an undertaker. Like his father and grandfather before him, he buries his townspeople, perhaps a couple of hundred a year. He lays them out on the slab, washes them, dresses them, folds their hands on their breasts, stitches up their anuses, closes their eyes. He puts them under the ground with rituals. He comforts the living.

For him, the word 'undertaking' has great resonance. As a child, he imagined the word literally - a taking under (though why not underputting? he wondered). As he grew older, he realised that undertaking was for the living: 'An undertaker was someone who stood with the living confronted with death and pledged to do whatever could be done with it.'

Then finally, undertaking became not something done for the living but something done by them: 'Undertakings,' he writes in an earlier collection, The Undertaking, 'are the things we do to vest the lives we lead against the cold, the meaningless, the void, the noisome blather and blinding dark. It is the voice we give to pain, to love and desire. Anger and courage, the words we shape into song and prayer.'

It is, says Lynch, a pledge and a promise. Reading such words, it no longer seems surprising that an undertaker should be a poet, for Lynch the poet is an undertaker all along.

In his final essay of this new collection, he makes the same lyrical connections between the words he writes and the trade he practises. Though many view an undertaker/poet like they would a cop who sings opera or a wrestler turned governor (and because it makes good copy, he charges accordingly, 'like a dancing bear'), here, he says, is the 'quiet, little truth of the matter. Requiems and prosodies, sonnets and obsequies, poems and funerals - they are all the same... an effort at meaning and metaphor, an exercise in symbol and ritualised speech, the heightened acoustics of language raised against what is reckoned unspeakable - faith and heartbreak, desire and pain, love and grief'.

Or as his hero Seamus Heaney says more succinctly, less self-indulgently: 'Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.'

Thomas Lynch is a romantic, in love with the sound of the words that he makes; besotted with the comparisons between poetry and funerals, the undertakings of life and the undertakings of death, between sex and death.

He remembers the first poem he ever heard; the first body he ever saw; the first woman he kissed. He was once an alcoholic, he tells us, and there is in this collection, soaked in reminiscence and that 'heightened acoustic of language', a sense of addiction to sorrow, melancholy, joy, to the nostalgic tales of fateful sexual encounters, and to the sense of himself as an undertaker/poet, lying awake at night while the woman he loves sleeps beside him, and the rain falls on the window, and maybe a candle flickers, and he a sleepless man, half his hard, mistake-laden life behind him, brimful of misty verse.

In The Undertaking, the essays were linked and they were all about the practicalities and metaphysics of his trade, and, as such, they were, if a bit early-Yeatsian in their romantic intensity, somehow irresistible in their unflinching details. Most of us fear death. We peek at death through our fingers, like children; we have to look and we can't. 'I'm not scared of dying,' said Woody Allen. 'I just don't want to be there when it happens.'

But Lynch is there for us, giving us details of what a dead body looks like, feels like, what it smells like, how the flesh congeals, how the relatives weep or turn away from bodies that may be, he says in this new book, 'skinny with Aids, green with liver failure, or bulbous with renal failure... and who'd want to see someone they love like this? Whatever way they got like this. Dead.' The unimaginable becomes commonplace. He sees death for us, reports back from a front line we haven't reached yet, but know we will.

By this collection, however, the subject has been mostly exhausted. Lynch has already written out his obvious subject, and in its place ruminates on all manner of other subjects: the womb, abortion, his ex-wife's bad behaviour, Bible studies, soft porn, fatherhood, his loathed cat, fishing, standing on the seashore, making packed lunches, the way he wrote a particular poem, other poets, his children.

Which is fine, but not what we want from him. We want the post mortem on mystery. His method is freewheeling and associative, letting words and metaphors ratchet him round to unexpected connections, usually coming back at the end to a contemplation of death.

But the most successful pieces in the book are still about his trade. He writes about Jessica Mitford, author of The American Way of Death, whom Lynch, though a friend of hers, accuses of focusing on costs and mechanics so she wouldn't have to think about what death actually means.

Indeed, Lynch fastens on to the word 'cost' throughout the book. 'Do the maths' is one of his favourite phrases, as is 'difficult maths' - adding up the sums for the casket, the funeral, the burial; adding up the costs of a life; getting and spending.

He writes about his son becoming a fully-blown, down-in-the-gutter alcoholic at a horribly early age, (a condition passed down from father to son, burying sorrows in the bottle; seeking oblivion, finding early heaven and hell in whisky and rum). He writes about undertaking chains and the quick-fix burial (Funerals-R-Us, he calls them, or McFunerals).

Best of all, he writes about caskets, and the whole way of selling a burial and marketing a death. After all, you can't enlarge the market like you can for bagels or poetry books. There's only one death for each potential customer's life: 'Do the maths.'

And, in his lovely, facile style that makes us a tad anxious about authenticity, he writes about authentic grief versus the Princess Diana grief. 'The therapy of spectacle', he calls this. 'Our humanity is dulled by mega-doses, like too much pornography dulls real sex... too much information dulls the truth.' Maybe, he says, if we were better at wakes and funerals ('those ancient parlour games we used to play for keeps'), we would have less 'free-floating, unattached heartache'.

In these patchy, repetitive, alluring essays, Lynch calls for us to be 'open to grief: deregulated, unplanned, unruly, potentially embarrassing grief'.