My Cemetery Friends
A Garden of Encounters at Mount Saint Mary in Queens, New York
A prolonged exercise in grief and respect for the dead, My Cemetery Friends gathers poetry and prose pieces that are rooted in a singular place.
Set in a relaxing, green pedestrian refuge surrounded by a noisy urban environment, Vincent J. Tomeo’s My Cemetery Friends is a reverential collection of poems and short prose pieces.
Drafted during Tomeo’s frequent walks through the Mount St. Mary Catholic Cemetery in Flushing, New York, across thirty-plus years, the pieces in this quite personal literary tour are a tribute to people met on the cemetery grounds as well as the veterans and others among those interred there. They also reflect a variety of cultural funerary practices and the memorial artworks and ornamental plantings that beautify the cemetery’s grounds.
Maps and photographs complement the work, making note of the specific sites of memorial artworks and individual graves across the cemetery’s fifty acres. Further context is provided via histories of immigration trends, wars, and epidemics.
The pieces are concerned with both nurturing Tomeo’s own memories and maintaining general respect for the dead. Tomeo notes that his mother is buried at Mount St. Mary, for example, and he includes a brief personal perspective on grief among his wider concerns:
Mama!
Every day for five years,
I visited your grave.
One Christmas day,
I was late.
The cemetery gates were locked.
Climbed a bronze fence,
left my tracks in the snow.
Still, more of the book’s attention is devoted to broader instances of grief, as with the entries that work to honor veterans (and, in particular, veterans of the Vietnam War), and in which a firm, compassionate antiwar ethos emerges. In addition, some poems are either preceded or followed by short prose pieces that place them in additional context; the technique is quite self-referential, and it leads to the unnecessary repetition of certain narrative elements and salient details.
Repetition is deployed to greater effect within individual poems, where it is sometimes used to create musicality and place thematic emphasis on certain topics. The intentional deviation from established repetition patterns has similar impacts. For example, in “I Visited the Grave of Marine Michael D. Glover,” respect for veterans is made to coexist with expressions of pacifism; in it, Tomeo meets with the mother of the deceased veteran at his graveside and asks himself “What does one say to a mother standing on her son’s grave?” and “What can one say to a mother who lost a child?” before wondering “How many more mothers must lose a child?” in a move that both reflects Tomeo’s particular, now familiar concerns and widens the entry’s overall scope.
Drawing inspiration from one of its author’s favorite places to wander, the guided poetry and prose collection My Cemetery Friends is about respect for the dead, grieving families, and the society-wide costs of war.
Reviewed by
Michele Sharpe
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
