It's a shrewd question aimed at poetry readers. Maybe it works well for those who are willing to accept poetry only as an off-shoot to narrative, but inevitably it seems to me this strong narrative drive must eventually dictate the style. A poet with a political statement to make, say, about language, might wish to draw readers' attention to it by allowing language to become the story. If you ask twenty currently practising poets this question and get twenty different answers, you might suspect that there are no hard and fast rules. In The Dead , drama seems inappropriate, as does a sense of dramatic timing.
Description is important.
The passage of time is suggested by descriptions of changes, but in a way that seems suspended from historical-time, dreamlike, perhaps aleatory. The pull the writing exerts on a reader is not the same as the pull of a verse novel or narrative poem. Intellect is involved, emotions less so. Because of the sound, I'd probably want to call The Dead poetic prose. Its the ideas, images, and various other indefinables that make it poetic.