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Final Arrangements
In this short collection of easy to read poetry, Mickey J. Corrigan explores burial practices around the globe. Why be buried in the same old way when you might choose to follow Japanese tradition and allow your family to pick through your ashes and retrieve your bones? Or you can opt for a final party like they do in Mexico, honoring the dead with lively music, food and drink. You could ask your beloved to dance with your old bones, an ancient practice in Madagascar.
These honest, dark poems have moments of strange humor as they illustrate for readers how various cultures help their dead return to the elements of creation. Ultimately, Final Arrangements is about the body and letting go of it. How we do this is our choice.
These honest, dark poems have moments of strange humor as they illustrate for readers how various cultures help their dead return to the elements of creation. Ultimately, Final Arrangements is about the body and letting go of it. How we do this is our choice.
24 pages, Paperback
Published April 5, 2019
About the author
Mickey J. Corrigan
39 books203 followersOriginally from Boston, Mickey J. Corrigan lives and writes and gets into trouble in South Florida, where the men run guns and the women run after them.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 21, 2020
Software developers in the mid-1990s used the word “elegant” to describe code capable of achieving its purpose efficiently without unneeded extra parts, without ten lines of code when three will do. “Streamlined” says almost the same but leaves out the added notion of thoughtful sophistication paired with deep reaching simplicity. Are you following?
I’m drawn to elegant poems, the ones that don’t trip over themselves with tortuous complexity, hidden puzzles, mouthfuls of unnecessary syllables that zig to the left and to the right when a straight line would get you to the right place without wearing you out.
This isn’t poetry dummied down. No. It’s actually smarter than most. It's the kind of writing that flies way up there, gliding with very little effort. It has the smooth lines of a Jaguar sedan before they started looking like Toyotas, Chryslers and everything else, or the sweet sheer of a Herreshoff hull versus a clunky Phil Bolger. I’m no fan of hard chines.
Micky J. Corrigan’s Final Arrangements is surely elegant while also coaxing death to speak to us through people of other places, places foreign and far away. She explores death in a way most would never try, bringing it in close instead of holding it out at arm’s length like a stiff mouse carcass evicted from the kitchen.
No, Corrigan walks among the graves, stopping to looking in, then she kneels to examine death more closely, gently coaxing the dead to speak, to tell us their death story with eyes opened, looking up at us from the grave.
These poems are not morbid, grotesque or macabre. They are sweet. Sweet as newborns in the beginning of life but instead the sweetness of life as it ends.
In poems titled When I Die in Florida or When I Die in Syria or When I Die in Japan, Corrigan gently takes our hands and leads us to see death. She pulls aside the curtain so we may pass into the world behind it, a journey we all should take to better bond as a global family.
Because death highlights our differences and our sameness too.
We are one. Death makes it so.
Death can be sad and bitter, premature or too long in coming, scary or welcomed. Some shy away. Others celebrate.
There are many angles, many traditions.
But in the end, death makes us brothers and sister even i nothing else will.
Corrigan’s observations in Final Arrangements are deeply insightful and comforting.
I would share them with the dying.
# # #
I’m drawn to elegant poems, the ones that don’t trip over themselves with tortuous complexity, hidden puzzles, mouthfuls of unnecessary syllables that zig to the left and to the right when a straight line would get you to the right place without wearing you out.
This isn’t poetry dummied down. No. It’s actually smarter than most. It's the kind of writing that flies way up there, gliding with very little effort. It has the smooth lines of a Jaguar sedan before they started looking like Toyotas, Chryslers and everything else, or the sweet sheer of a Herreshoff hull versus a clunky Phil Bolger. I’m no fan of hard chines.
Micky J. Corrigan’s Final Arrangements is surely elegant while also coaxing death to speak to us through people of other places, places foreign and far away. She explores death in a way most would never try, bringing it in close instead of holding it out at arm’s length like a stiff mouse carcass evicted from the kitchen.
No, Corrigan walks among the graves, stopping to looking in, then she kneels to examine death more closely, gently coaxing the dead to speak, to tell us their death story with eyes opened, looking up at us from the grave.
These poems are not morbid, grotesque or macabre. They are sweet. Sweet as newborns in the beginning of life but instead the sweetness of life as it ends.
In poems titled When I Die in Florida or When I Die in Syria or When I Die in Japan, Corrigan gently takes our hands and leads us to see death. She pulls aside the curtain so we may pass into the world behind it, a journey we all should take to better bond as a global family.
Because death highlights our differences and our sameness too.
We are one. Death makes it so.
Death can be sad and bitter, premature or too long in coming, scary or welcomed. Some shy away. Others celebrate.
There are many angles, many traditions.
But in the end, death makes us brothers and sister even i nothing else will.
Corrigan’s observations in Final Arrangements are deeply insightful and comforting.
I would share them with the dying.
# # #
March 16, 2020
The poems in Mickey Corrigan's chapbook, Final Arrangements, take a tour around the world to peer in on the death rites of different cultures--including Nigeria, India, Syria, Mexico, Polynesia, Japan, Madagascar, and the U.S. (specifically: Florida). I especially like the dichotomy highlighted between Eastern and Western practices (so cold and sanitized and impersonal here in the West, yeah?) and the breezy tone throughout, which reminds us that death is a natural progression, to be accepted, and even celebrated in one's unique way. The mourners and their keen grief are not forgotten, either, and there are some beautiful sentiments, such as in "When I Die in Syria", with the lines: "Lie down now / beside my simple mound / and put your soft ear / to the dirt. / I will tell you / how I lived." Perhaps my favorite in the collection is the poem "Ars Moriendi" (The Art of Dying), specifically the gorgeous lines: "deep in the woods / taxidermists / pour oils down my throat / spread leaves on my skin..." All in all, this brief chapbook offers much on a subject that affects us all, and is worth reading.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews