Book description
Like all poets, inspired by death, Lynch is, unlike others, also hired
to bury the dead or cremate them and to tend to their families in a
small Michigan town where he serves as the funeral director. In the
conduct of these duties he has kept his eyes open, his ears tuned to the
indispensable vernaculars of love and grief. In these twelve essays is
the voice of both witness and functionary. Lynch stands between 'the
living and the living who have dies' with the same outrage and
amazement, straining for the same glimpse we all get of what mortality
means to a vital species. So here is homage to parents who have died and
to children who shouldn't have. Here are golfers tripping over
grave-markers, gourmands and hypochondriacs, lovers and suicides. These
are essays of rare elegance and grace, full of fierce compassion and
rich in humour and humanity - lessons taught to the living by the dead.
'Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople.'
So opens the singular testimony of the American poet, Thomas Lynch.
Like all poets, inspired by death, Lynch is, unlike others, also hired
to bury the dead or cremate them to tend to their families in a small
Michigan town where he serves as the funeral director. In the conduct
of these duties he has kept his eyes open, his ears tuned to the
indispensable vernaculars of love and grief.
In these twelve essays is the voice of the both witness and
functionary. Lynch stands between 'the living and the living who have
died' with the same outrage and amazement, straining for the same
glimpse we all get of what mortality means to a vital species. These
are essays of rare elegance and grace, full of fierce compassion and
rich in humour and humanity - lessons taught to the living by the dead.
Thomas Lynch is the author of Grimalkin & Other Poems
(1994). His poems and essays have appeared in the London Review
of Books and The New Yorker.
