First book, Lynch speaks directly and boldly, invoking ritual by bringing the reader close to its performance: “Soon as I am able/ I intend to turn/ to gold myself.” A Midwesterner who earns his living as an undertaker, Lynch writes poems that unpretentiously rehearse the dreams of the dying as they celebrate the everchanging relationships of the livingof four children, of a marriage in transition. There is craft and careful language, at times a Yeatsian echo, as in the three “Argyle” pieces for the sin-eater of old Ireland who serves the dead. Throughout, Lynch traces his ties to the past, and though his poems sometimes dazzleas do the metaphysical conceits of “For the ex-wife on what I don’t wish you”as often they are ways of “learning gravity,” Heather Grace’s task in the title poem.