CANR
WORK TITLE: THE DEPOSITIONS: NEW AND SELECTED ESSAYS ON BEING AND CEASING TO BE
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Milford
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 179
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born October 16, 1948, in Detroit, MI; married Mary Tata (a visual artist and sculptor); children: Heather, Tom, Michael, Sean.
EDUCATION:Wayne State University, certification in mortuary science.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, novelist, poet, educator, commentator, broadcaster, lecturer, and funeral director. University of Michigan, adjunct professor in the graduate creative writing program. Lynch and Sons (funeral home), Milford, MI, funeral director, 1974–. Commentator on radio and television networks, including BBC Radio, RTE (Ireland), C-SPAN, MSNBC, PBS, and National Public Radio (NPR). Lecturer at universities in Europe, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.
AWARDS:American Book Award, 1998, National Book Award finalist, and Heartland Prize for nonfiction, all for The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade; Great Lakes Book Award, for Bodies in Motion and at Rest; recipient of grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Michigan Council for the Arts, the Michigan Library Association, the Writers Voice Project, the National Book Foundation, the Arvon Foundation (England), and the Irish Arts Council.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including the New Yorker, Poetry, Harper’s, Esquire, Newsweek, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Irish Times, Times (London, England), and the Paris Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Essayist, poet, and funeral director Thomas Lynch has written three critically acclaimed volumes of poetry and two award-winning volumes of essays. By using his own daily routine as poetic fodder, Lynch has transformed the mundane task of preparing the dead into a life-affirming event. His lyrical, elegiac poems describe the dead citizens of Milford, Michigan, his own family relationships, and scenes and myths from his Irish Catholic upbringing. In a Religion & Ethics Newsweekly Web site interview with Bob Abernathy, Lynch noted the conflicted approach most people have to funeral directors. “People need us, but they don’t necessarily want to need us,” he mused. “The tuition is a high one. It’s a little bit, I suppose, like the oncologist; or the lawyer when you’re in trouble; or the clergy when you’re vexed by your conscience. You need them, but you don’t want to need them. In one sense, people are grateful to us. But they’re not grateful for the circumstance that brings them to us.” In the end, Lynch told Abernathy, “We serve the living by caring for the dead. We measure how well we do each.”
Skating with Heather Grace and Grimalkin and Other Poems
Skating with Heather Grace, Lynch’s first collection, contains forty-two poems that feature scenes from his everyday life. In these works his wife, dog, children, and work all make appearances. Some of the poems are set in Michigan, while others use Ireland or Italy as a backdrop. The title poem is a “tender meditation” about Lynch’s daughter, according to a Publishers Weekly critic. Library Journal reviewer Rosaly DeMaios Roffman found that the poems “unpretentiously rehearse the dreams of the dying as they celebrate the everchanging relationships of the living.” Lynch, according to Roffman, crafts poems that weave symbolism and mythology into the human experience. Of particular merit are the poems about Argyle, the mythical Sin-Eater who tends to the souls of the dead, Roffman suggested.
Lynch’s second volume, Grimalkin and Other Poems, likewise contains elements of the poet’s professional and personal life mixed with his ruminations about Irish culture and history. One can hear echoes of the Catholic liturgy, the church choir, and the “voices of lament in his ancestral County Clare, and all of the sacred mysteries for him were translated early into women’s flesh,” noted Agenda critic Alan Wall. In a “strong” and “elegiac” poetic voice, according to Wall, Lynch buries the dead and other things, such as a marriage, old loves, and the sexual ghosts of his childhood, with equal panache.
The Undertaking and Bodies in Motion and at Rest
The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade is a collection of twelve essays that reflect the author’s “eloquent, meditative observations on the place of death in small-town life,” according to a critic in Kirkus Reviews. Lynch’s poetic vision is indelibly colored by his undertaking business, and what he sees often contrasts with what lies on the surface. While his wife admires the architectural styles of buildings they encounter on an evening stroll, he sees a couple, wonderful dancers both, dead from asphyxiation in the garage. From the embalming of his own father to the opening of the newly refurbished bridge to the Milford cemetery, Lynch writes about death “with dignity and passion,” according to a Publishers Weekly reviewer, resulting in “a superb collection of essays.” London Observer reviewer Matthew Sweeney admired the “balance and clarity” of Lynch’s writing, which occupies different emotional registers, “moving from the humorous to the tender to the stern.” Dispelling the myths about people in his trade, Lynch wrote, “I am no more attracted to the dead than the dentist is to your bad gums, the doctor to your rotten innards, or the accountant to your sloppy expense records.” His profession has provided Lynch not only with a living, but with a unique vantage point from which to observe the entire cycle of life. Washington Post reviewer Jonathan Yardley observed that “there can be no question that what Lynch has learned about life and death in that day job deeply informs and enriches his writing.
Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality is a collection of essays described by New York Times Book Review contributor Sherie Posesorski as an “engaging hybrid of memoir, meditation, and comic monologue. … Lynch approaches his subjects with a beautifully executed balance of irreverence with reverence, gallows humor with emotional delicacy, and no-nonsense immanence with lyrical transcendence.” Lynch writes of his Roman Catholic childhood, his family, being a father, and the relationship between “mortuary and literary arts.”
Barbara Brown Taylor wrote in Christian Century that “hailed as ‘a cross between Garrison Keillor and William Butler Yeats,’ Lynch is living proof of his thesis that familiarity with the facts of death improves one’s capacity for the wonders of life. … The essays in this book contain wrenching accounts of his and his son’s battles with addiction as well as luminous tales of love between husband, wife, parent, and child.” Taylor remarked that readers “may expect a poet’s eye for image and a poet’s ear for language, as well as a poet’s ability to hold open the door to meaning without shoving anyone through.”
Booking Passage
In his essay collection Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans, Lynch reflects deeply on his Irish heritage and on his lifelong quest to understand and appreciate both his family’s origins in Ireland and his life in America. Over the course of three decades, Lynch has made repeated trips between his home in Michigan and an ancestral cottage he inherited in Moveen, County Clare, in the west of Ireland. He first went there in 1970, as a twenty-one-year-old student, where he met Tommy and Nora, two unmarried cousins who had gained almost iconic status in his family history, and who were his only remaining relatives native to Ireland. Regular trips to Ireland strengthened the family ties between distant relatives. When Nora died, he inherited the family cottage, which he has used as both residence and retreat for himself and other writers. Within his book, Lynch tells the story of his family’s difficult life in Ireland and America. He recounts his attempts to modernize his cottage with the simplest of conveniences, such as running water and electricity. He examines his Catholic religion and the place of the Church in modern Ireland, and sharply criticizes the Catholic Church for the molestation and abuse scandals that marred its reputation and disrupted its mission. Lynch also considers his own life and personal difficulties and triumphs, including a struggle against alcoholism, marriage woes, and the unique characteristics of his profession. A Publishers Weekly contributor named the work a “deeply thought-out book filled with poetry, pathos, triumph and lots of Irish laughter.”
Commenting on Lynch’s quest to involve himself in his Irish ancestry, Guardian reviewer Lionel Shriver observed that “as a fine stylist, Thomas Lynch rises head and shoulders above the bog of other Irish-Americans who adopt Ireland as a second home and then, with much time on their hands in lousy weather, get fired up to write about it.” Lynch’s “book is full of incident, touching and hilarious, and repays serious attention,” commented Seattle Times reviewer Clarence Brown. “It also repays frivolous attention,” Brown continued. “It is a good read even for those who have not the least ancestral or national bias—for those who desire civilized entertainment along with brilliant narrative.”
Apparition and Late Fictions
(open new)In 2010 Lynch published the novella and short story collection Apparition and Late Fictions. The prose fiction in this collection consists of five short stories and a ninety-page novella. In “Catch and Release,” a thirty-year-old angling instructor honors his father after he dies abruptly. His ashes are cast into the lake where they had frequently fished together. In the story “Bloodsport,” Martin, an undertaker, buries a woman who was shot by her husband. He also recalls how he had longed for her since the first time they met at her father’s funeral when she was just a teenager. In “Hunter’s Moon,” coffin sales representative Harold tries to sort out the mess of his previous three failed marriages and also come to terms with the death of his daughter. In the novella, Adrian, a Methodist minister, decides to become a self-help guru after his wife cheats on him with a younger man for whom she eventually leaves him. He begins writing books on separation and divorce that become bestsellers but eventually reveal some of Adrian’s other quirks in life.
A contributor reviewing the collection in the Irish Independent reasoned that “if the themes of these stories seem depressing, the treatment of them isn’t. Lynch is a master of wry observation and arresting insights and his attention to the quirks of his characters ensures that they come vividly alive.” The same critic opined that the “novella that closes the collection and gives it its title is even finer.”
The Sin-Eater
Lynch published the poetry collection The Sin-Eater: A Breviary in 2011. Lynch’s fifth poetry collection combines twenty-four poems with twenty-six black-and-white photographs of western Ireland. Argyle is again featured in this collection as the titular entity, while many of the poems included are personal in nature.
Reviewing the novel in Prairie Schooner, Elinor Benedict opined that its “striking cover photograph of a dark tower-house perched above the sea seems to bid readers to come into the poems.” Benedict noted that readers need not worry “that this book is a prudish religious tract from a boy whose family wanted him to be a priest. Providing services for grieving people is also a calling that men of the Lynch family, along with a ghost named Argyle, have answered willingly and successfully. And surely poetry is appropriate for this mission, itself a kind of paraclete.” Benedict concluded that The Sin-Eater “offers a splendid melding of language, vision, voice, and agape love. It is a gift–a richly imaginative work tinged with rascally humor and suffused with those ‘doubts and wonders’ that produce awe: a reading that is both entertaining and profound.”
The Depositions and Whence and Whither
In 2019 Lynch published The Depositions: New and Selected Essays on Being and Ceasing to Be. New and previously published essays are compiled to offer Lynch’s perspectives on life as a small-town funeral director and also as a writer and poet. Booklist contributor Elizabeth Joseph pointed out that by looking into his “life and society’s norms … Lynch reminds us to accept the frailties of life and the mystery of death.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly found it to be “often emotionally affecting.” The same reviewer concluded that “this assemblage is an erudite but unpretentious discussion of life and mortality by a master craftsman of language.”
Lynch also published Whence and Whither: On Lives and Living in 2019. This book serves as a collection of writings on death and the meaning of living. Again Lynch frames his views from the perspective of a funeral director, including snippets from his own life, like riding in the hearse before the funeral of poet laureate Seamus Heaney. He also reflects on his own mortality.
Writing in MBR Bookwatch, Mary Cowper insisted that “Lynch has an uncanny knack for writing about death in ways that are never morbid, always thoughtful, often humorous, and quite moving.” A contributor reviewing the collection in the Christian Century claimed that “as always, Thomas Lynch connects” life and death “with eloquent prose that dips into deep faithfulness.” Writing in Read the Spirit, David Crumm pointed out that “in the volume’s introduction, Lynch makes it perfectly clear that this is a somewhat jumbled collection…. But the great treasure in Lynch’s work is discovering the cosmos of connections to which he points. The same thing is true here: He’s serving up a great fireside bowl of treats.”(close new)
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Lynch, Thomas, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 1997.
PERIODICALS
Agenda, September 22, 1994, Alan Wall, review of Grimalkin and Other Poems, p. 241.
Bomb, June 22, 2000, Glenn Moomau, review of Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality, p. 21.
Booklist, August 1, 1998, Donna Seaman, review of Still Life in Milford, p. 1954; June 1, 2000, Donna Seaman, review of Bodies in Motion and at Rest, p. 1803; November 1, 2019, Elizabeth Joseph, review of The Depositions: New and Selected Essays on Being and Ceasing to Be, p. 5.
Christian Century, November 18, 1998, review of The Undertaking, p. 1119; November 22, 2000, Barbara Brown Taylor, review of Bodies in Motion and at Rest, p. 1216; April 10, 2019, review of Whence and Whither: On Lives and Living, p. 43.
Commonweal, June 19, 1998, Frank McConnell, review of The Undertaking, p. 20.
Georgia Review, September 22, 2002, Sanford Pinsker, review of Bodies in Motion and at Rest, pp. 854-62.
Guardian (London, England), August 21, 2005, Stephanie Merritt, review of Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans; November 5, 2005, Lionel Shriver, review of Booking Passage.
Hudson Review, June 22, 1999, Thomas M. Disch, review of Still Life in Milford, p. 315.
Inc., July 1, 1998, review of The Undertaking, p. 11.
Insight on the News, July 17, 2000, Stephen Goode, “Lynch Writes from Unique Background,” p. 36.
Irish Independent, February 20, 2010, review of Apparition and Late Fictions.
Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, February 1, 2002, Kristin Davis, “Six Feet Under: Thomas Lynch Has Buried 6,000 of His Neighbors; He Talks about the Business of Death,” p. 78.
Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 1997, review of The Undertaking, p. 699.
Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, June 21, 2000, Marta Salij, “Thomas Lynch: Poet in Motion,” p. K2676.
Library Journal, March 1, 1987, Rosaly DeMaios Roffman, review of Skating with Heather Grace, p. 79; September 15, 1998, Barbara Hoffert, review of Still Life in Milford, p. 83.
MBR Bookwatch, June 1, 2019, review of Whence and Whither.
New York Review of Books, September 24, 1998, A. Alvarez, review of The Undertaking, p. 24.
New York Times, May 31, 2000, Richard Bernstein, review of Bodies in Motion and at Rest, p. E8; June 8, 2000, Dinitia Smith, “Matters of Life and Death: A Prizewinning Writer Holds onto His Day Job as a Funeral Director,” p. E1.
New York Times Book Review, September 24, 2000, Sherie Posesorski, review of Bodies in Motion and at Rest, p. 23.
Observer (London, England), April 6, 1997, Matthew Sweeney, review of The Undertaking, p. 17.
Poetry, December 1, 1998, John Taylor, review of Still Life in Milford, p. 184.
Prairie Schooner, 2012, Elinor Benedict, review of The Sin-Eater: A Beviary, p. 169.
Publishers Weekly, December 26, 1986, review of Skating with Heather Grace, p. 54; May 5, 1997, review of The Undertaking, p. 184; June 29, 1998, review of Still Life in Milford, p. 53; May 23, 2005, review of Booking Passage, p. 74; September 9, 2019, review of The Depositions, p. 56.
Quadrant, March 1, 1998, Iain Bamforth, review of The Undertaking, p. 81.
Reference & Research Book News, May 1, 2006, review of Booking Passage.
Seattle Times, August 5, 2005, Clarence Brown, review of Booking Passage.
Spectator, July 15, 2000, Harry Mount, review of Bodies in Motion and at Rest, p. 34.
Times Literary Supplement, September 25, 1998, David Wheatley, review of Still Life in Milford, p. 24; July 14, 2000, David Wheatley, review of Bodies in Motion and at Rest, p. 27.
U.S. Catholic, November 1, 2002, “What Makes a Good Funeral? The Editors Interview Thomas Lynch,” p. 12.
Washington Post, August 2, 2005, Jonathan Yardley, “At Home Abroad: Irish in America,” review of Booking Passage, p. C09.
Wilson Quarterly, September 22, 2005, Terence Winch, review of Booking Passage, p. 117.
ONLINE
Emigrant Online, http://www.emigrant.ie/ (March 17, 2008), review of Booking Passage.
Image Journal, https://imagejournal.org/ (January 20, 2020), Gregory Wolfe, “A Conversation with Thomas Lynch.”
Irish Echo Online, http://www.irishecho.com/ (March 17, 2008), Peter McDermott, “From Milford to Moveen.”
Norton Poets Online, http://www.nortonpoets.com/ (March 17, 2008), author profile.
Poetry Foundation website, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ (January 20, 2020), author profile.
Read the Spirit, https://readthespirit.com/ (March 26, 2019), David Crum, review of Whence and Whither.
Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/ (May 4, 2007), Bob Abernathy, author interview.
Thomas Lynch website, http://www.thomaslynch.com (January 20, 2020).
Thomas Lynch is the author of five collections of poems and four books of essays. A book of stories, Apparition & Late Fictions, published in 2010 to critical acclaim, is now available in paperback and can be purchased in bookstores and online.
A "Classic Contemporary" edition of Skating with Heather Grace, his first book of poems, has just be reissued by Carnegie-Mellon University Press. In 2011, Paraclete Press published The Sin Eater: A Breviary -- a collection of his sin-eater poems accompanied by black and white photographs by Michael Lynch and cover art by Sean Lynch. Salmon Press, The Cliffs of Moher, Co. Clare, Ireland published an Irish edition in 2012. The Good Funeral - Death, Grief & The Community of Care, co-authored with theologian, Dr. Thomas G. Long, was published in September, 2013.
Thomas Lynch's work has been the subject of two film documentaries. PBS Frontline's The Undertaking, aired nationwide in 2007, won the 2008 Emmy Award for Arts and Culture Documentary. Cathal Black's film, Learning Gravity, produced for the BBC, was featured at the 2008 Telluride Film Festival and the 6th Traverse City Film Festival in 2009 where it was awarded the Michigan Prize by Michael Moore. He has taught with the Department of Mortuary Science at Wayne State University in Detroit, with the graduate program in writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and with the Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA. He is a charter member of the faculty of the Bear River Writers Conference at Walloon Lake in Michigan.
Thomas Lynch's essays, poems and stories have appeared in The Atlantic and Granta, The New York Times and Times of London, The New Yorker, Poetry and The Paris Review and elsewhere. He lives in Milford, Michigan where he has been the funeral director since 1974, and in Moveen, Co. Clare, Ireland where he keeps an ancestral cottage.
Thomas Lynch (poet)
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For other persons named Thomas Lynch, see Thomas Lynch (disambiguation).
Thomas Lynch (born 1948 in Detroit, Michigan) is an American poet, essayist, and undertaker.
Contents
1 Early life
2 Awards
3 International recognition
4 Works
4.1 Poetry
4.2 Fiction
4.3 Non-Fiction
4.4 Anthologies
5 Reviews
6 References
7 External links
Early life
Lynch was educated by nuns and Christian Brothers at Brother Rice High School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Lynch then went to university and mortuary school, from which he graduated in 1973. He took over his father's funeral home in Milford, Michigan in 1974, a job he has held ever since. Lynch married in 1972 and divorced in 1984. He later remarried to Mary Tata in 1991. He has a daughter and three sons.
In 1970 Lynch went to Ireland for the first time, to find his family and read William Butler Yeats and James Joyce, an experience he recounts in his book Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans. He has returned many times since then, and now owns the small cottage in West Clare that was the home of his great-great-grandfather, and which was given as a wedding gift in the 19th century. He spends a portion of each year there.
Awards
His collection of essays, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade,[1] won the Heartland Prize for non-fiction, the American Book Award,[2] and was a finalist for the National Book Award. It has been translated into seven languages. A second collection of essays, Bodies in Motion and at Rest, won the Great Lakes Book Award.
International recognition
Lynch's work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, Harper's, Esquire, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Irish Times, and The Times. His commentaries have been recorded and broadcast by BBC Radio, RTÉ and NPR. His work has been the subject of two documentary films. "Learning Gravity" directed by Kathel Black for Little Bird Productions UK aired on the BBC and RTÉ. PBS Frontline's "The Undertaking" a film by Karen O'Conner and Miri Navasky aired in October 2007 on PBS stations nationwide. It won the 2008 Emmy Award for Arts and Culture Documentary.
Lynch is the recipient of grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Michigan Council for the Arts, the Michigan Library Association, the Writers Voice Project, the National Book Foundation, the Arvon Foundation and the Arts Council of Ireland. He has read and lectured at universities and literary centers throughout Europe, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. Lynch is also a regular presenter to professional conferences of funeral directors, hospice and medical ethics professionals, clergy, educators, and business leaders. He is an Adjunct Professor in the graduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has appeared on C-SPAN, MSNBC, The Today Show, and the PBS Bill Moyers series, On Our Own Terms.
Works
Poetry
Skating with Heather Grace, Knopf, 1986
Grimalkin and Other Poems. Cape Poetry. 1994.
Still Life in Milford: Poems. W. W. Norton & Company. 1999. ISBN 978-0-393-31973-6.
Walking Papers: Poems 1999 - 2009. W. W. Norton & Company. 2010. ISBN 978-0-393-04208-5.
The Sin-eater - A Breviary published by Parclete Press in 2013 and in Ireland by Salmon Publishing, The Cliffs of Moher.
Fiction
Apparition and Late Fictions. W. W. Norton & Company. 2010. ISBN 978-0-393-04207-8.
Non-Fiction
The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade. W. W. Norton & Company. 1997. ISBN 978-0-393-04112-5.
Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality. W. W. Norton & Company. 2001. ISBN 978-0-393-32164-7.
Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans. W. W. Norton & Company. 2006. ISBN 978-0-393-32857-8.
Anthologies
Michael Delp, Conrad Hilberry, Herbert Scott, eds. (1988). "Like My Father Waking Early". Contemporary Michigan poetry: poems from the third coast. Photographs Michael Delp. Wayne State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8143-1924-6.
Michael Delp, Conrad Hilberry, Josie Kearns, eds. (2000). "An Evening Walk to the Sea by Friesians". New poems from the third coast: contemporary Michigan poetry. Wayne State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8143-2797-5.
A Conversation with Thomas Lynch
Gregory Wolfe | Issue 59
Thomas Lynch is the author of three collections of poetry: Skating with Heather Grace (Knopf), Grimalkin & Other Poems (Jonathan Cape), and Still Life in Milford (Jonathan Cape and W.W. Norton). His essay collection The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade (Norton) won the Heartland Prize for nonfiction and the American Book Award, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and has been translated into eight languages. A second collection of essays, Bodies in Motion and at Rest (Norton) won the Great Lakes Book Award. Booking Passage: We Irish & Americans was published in 2005 (Norton and Cape). His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, Paris Review, Harper’s, Esquire, Newsweek, Christian Century, Boston Globe, Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Irish Times, and Times of London. His commentaries have been recorded and broadcast by BBC Radio, RTE in Ireland, and NPR. He is the recipient of grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Michigan Council for the Arts, National Book Foundation, and Irish Arts Council, as well as Image’s Denise Levertov Award in 2008. He is a regular speaker at professional conferences of funeral directors, hospice and medical ethics professionals, clergy, counselors, educators, and business leaders, as well as an adjunct professor in the graduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has appeared on C-Span, MSNBC, the Today Show, and Bill Moyers’ PBS series On Our Own Terms. He currently lives in Milford, Michigan, where for the past thirty years he has been the town’s funeral director, and in West Clare, Ireland, where he keeps an ancestral cottage. He was interviewed by Image editor Gregory Wolfe.
Image: Years after publishing The Undertaking, you continue to write and speak about the phenomenon of death and the way we treat our dead. Have you found any new trends or issues cropping up in recent years?
Thomas Lynch: I do some speaking to hospice and social workers and clergy and funeral directors—people who deal with end-of-life issues—and one of the things I’ve been trying to hit on lately is the terrible denaturing of our cemetery and crematory practices. These days, if we bury, we often do not see a grave, and if we burn, we never see a fire. I think that misses all the metaphoric value. I just spoke with a man in Spokane, Washington, who had managed to make the two-thousand-mile trip back to Chicago to bury his mother, but almost didn’t get the extra fifty yards from the chapel (so called) where they had the committal service (so called) to the grave, because the cemetery didn’t do things that way. (They always cite liability as the excuse.) The family came out of the chapel a little stunned that this was the end of the service at the Catholic cemetery, and then they walked over to the gravesite and found the hole covered by a piece of plywood. They stood there and said a prayer to bless the grave. But they never did see their mother’s body in the ground like they had come to see.
I’m writing an article for Christian Century just now in hopes that the Christian clergy can make that change. If you’re a Jew, your rabbi sees to it that you get to see a grave. The religion requires it. It’s the same if you’re a Muslim in America: You’re going to get into the ground in front of your people. The clergy lead the way on that. Unfortunately, both the Christian clergy and the Christian funeral directors have put convenience in the place of custom in many ways, particularly in large, metropolitan, privately owned cemeteries, including church-owned cemeteries. At Holy Sepulcher, where my parents are buried, when my father died sixteen years ago in February, we went to the grave and buried him. If he had died this past February, we couldn’t have done that. The nun who runs the cemetery would not have allowed it, and the cardinal upholds her right to disallow it.
Image: As a culture, we’re obsessed with the body, its health. But the end of the body’s life is the one issue that we can’t stick with. In the wake of 9/11, would you say there has been some change in this regard? For me, one of the most moving things about the Ground Zero scene was the search for the bodies, the need for some kind of completion and touching, however gruesome and horrible.
TL: After 9/11 people did want bodily confirmation that what they knew in their heads and feared in their hearts was in fact true. In New York, as they’ve tried to open new streets and do new construction, they’re always finding body parts. There are something like ten thousand body parts now that they are cataloguing and trying to match. Something on the order of forty percent of the people who died in the Twin Towers have not been identified.
But what troubles me is the routine distancing of the living from the dead. In some ways, the hospice movement has restored our place at bedside during the dying process. It’s replaced intensive care with family care, or a version of it, which is very good in the long run. In some regions of the country, many people are more or less accustomed to having some type of wake or other involvement with the dead. But here on the west coast, for a long time the procedure has been to replace the funeral with the body there with a commemorative event where everyone’s invited but the dead guy, a memorial service or a “celebration of life,” something more convenient for all concerned. I’ve always thought that’s the ritual equivalent of a wedding without the bride or a baptism without the baby.
I would suggest that family members do well to go the distance with their dead. Whether they consign them to the ground or the fire or the sea or the air, by giving them to the edge of that oblivion, they will have done some deeply human work. I think basic Humanity 101 says that the living should take the dead to their graves. This isn’t for the sake of the dead, but for the sake of the living. You can’t do much to harm the dead, and you can’t do much to improve them. The dead don’t care. I am convinced of that. If heaven’s anything it’s cracked up to be, the dead don’t have to worry about their bodies anymore. This is solely good housekeeping for the sake of the living. We deal with the idea of the thing by dealing with the thing itself. The way we deal with death is by dealing with our dead. The way we deal with our mortality is by dealing with mortals. The way we process this is by processing, in the liturgy, from one station to another, in what Tom Long calls the “sacred community theater” that manages a changed status of the living to the dead.
Image: You mentioned that burial is more for the living than the dead, and yet there is this Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body. Does it have any meaning now? What can we mean when we say the resurrection of the body?
TL: People who believe in Paul’s doctrine of the resurrection of the body would assume that in heaven I will be a balding, well-bellied fellow. I’m not going to look like Brad Pitt in heaven. My friends will recognize me. This body I’m in now is the one that will be resurrected. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t be resurrected if I’m buried or burned or blown out of a cannon or left out for scavenger birds to eat. We figure if God can do the one thing, he can do the other.
But you raise an important question. Is there a general downsizing of our expectations about heaven? I think so. We do not know the furniture as well as we used to. For example, your wife’s grandfather would have understood heaven to include certain things: his neighbors would be recognizable, would speak with the same wisdom and stupidity they had in real life, but would be somehow changed, in a moment, in a twinkling. They would be somehow perfected by their beatific vision.
Image: As much as the doctrine seemed to be about the life to come, it causes some retroactive ennobling of life here—that Christ after the resurrection bore the marks of his crucifixion, that you might be a balding gentleman in heaven.
TL: I think Catholics have always understood that the body keeps track of this human adventure of life. We are impressed by stigmata, however we come by them. When Christ tells Thomas, “I am the way and the truth and the life,” I believe he might have been trying to say, “Mine is the way”—and his way is to suffer. That to me rings true. I don’t think he is saying that you’ve got to be a Catholic or even a Christian to get to heaven. I hear him saying, “You’ve got to suffer this life to get to heaven, and your body, with its age and infirmity and aches and pains and joys and wonders, all of this is gift, all of this is redemptive.” I think Paul understood that part. Paul was big on the notion of redemptive suffering.
That’s probably why, among Christians, Catholics are the most likely to haul the dead guy into church and waft a little incense around and light candles to keep the reek from rising off the corpse and dress the body in its baptismal gown again. They understand that this is the completion of a metaphor. And Catholics still, for the most part, insist on going the distance with their dead, all the way to the grave.
Which makes it doubly vexing to me that a Catholic cemetery would say, for the sake of liability, that in the winter in Michigan we can’t allow people to go to the grave. That’s the same Catholicity Lite that hands the undertaker the book and says, “You say the prayers of the grave because the priest has an appointment.” I say, if I can call you to come embalm at three o’clock in the morning, then I’d be happy to say some prayers for you. It matters who says the prayers. This is about the office of the clergy.
Image: When you discuss these issues, the body and death and sexuality and life, I think of you as a judicious writer. You’re reflective in your weighing of virtues and vices, pros and cons. Would it be fair to say that you’re more worried about what we’re losing as a culture than what we’ve gained?
TL: I’d say that as a culture we’re dumbing down the experience of a funeral. We’re making it sort of a Hallmark, Disneyfied event rather than a deeply human one. It’s like going to Vegas and thinking you’re in Venice because the hotel is called the Venetian. For generations, we’ve tried to put product in the place of real experience. If we look at funerals in an essential sense, three things are required: There is someone who has to quit breathing forever, and there are other people to whom it matters. And then there is someone who stands between the living and the dead to broker a peace between them—the priest, rabbi, shaman, or imam, who says, “Behold, I show you a mystery.” Put another way, the living have to get the dead where they need to go so that the living end up where they need to be, which is living a life without this person. These are the basic duties. The rest, to me, is accessory: whether you use cardboard or mahogany, how you handle the body, even many of the liturgical imperatives. If we deal with what’s in front of us—the corpus—if we get that essential work done, the rest makes sense. Suddenly, the prayers begin to make sense. But absent these human duties, the prayers, to me, ring hollow.
Image: You’ve written pretty bluntly about certain aspects of the Catholic Church, from obvious abuses like the sexual scandals to some of the finer points of church teaching. And yet your writing is permeated by a Catholic sensibility. How do you maintain a balance between tough-minded critique and a sense of participation, of being a part of something larger than your critiquing mind?
TL: This is always a mystery to me. What drew me to your magazine, apart from its obvious splendor, is its subtitle, Art, Faith, Mystery, which takes in a bigger congregation than you may be aware. Most people are constantly trying to broker a peace between what they understand as artistic metaphors and what they understand as religious mysteries, and their own life of faith falls in between those things.
I don’t know why it is that I’m so peeved that, for example, on the fifteenth Sunday in ordinary time last year Pope Benedict found it necessary to talk about the defects of other Christian traditions and the wounds that are a part of those traditions, and to say that even though their members might find their way into pious life and have certainly done their part, they are not the real deal. That same week, Cardinal Mahoney was spending upwards of $660 million to settle accounts, in part, for defective fellow travelers under his archdiocesan purview. And on that very same Sunday, at the 10:15 mass in Carrigaholt, Father Patrick Culligan, who could’ve retired ten years ago but doesn’t because without him three parishes on the west coast of Clare would go without a parish priest, stood up and said, of the gospel of the Good Samaritan, “I think the idea is to be a good passenger in the boat of life.” As a devoutly lapsed Catholic, hearing that I say, “I can get behind that theory. Let me in that boat. Let me try to do my part to be the best. I belong there.” But it is hurtsome. We are wounded by the wholesale malfeasance and mismanagement of the church through these scandals. Maybe I’m especially troubled because I got a double dose of it, hearing in Ireland the shrill echo of what was happening here. There I live in a small place where everybody knows everybody, and they experienced exactly the same thing at exactly the same time.
Yet, everywhere I go, I find myself in church praying. I went to Cincinnati to a conference last month, found my way up to Mount Adams and into a church, and ended up in the side office where they had mass for eight people. To be on top of that liturgy was sublime. But here’s the thing: it’s always matched by the ridiculous. The priest’s pet parrot was in the next room, and every time the priest said, “Let us pray,” the parrot would start giving out from some bawdy hymnal that he had learned by heart. I thought, God is good, whoever she is.
I’m sure it’s character flaws in me that make me look at this church in the corporate sense and say, “Oh my word. I couldn’t run a business like that.” And yet, as an imam said to me a couple weeks ago, “Islam isn’t the problem. Muslims are.” I said the same could be said for Christians.
Image: Did you follow the pope’s visit? Is there anything that can be said for what he tried to do here? He certainly seemed to take the topic of the abuse scandals pretty head on.
TL: It was very, very moving. And I’m right with all those people who said it was a surprise. There is a dearness and a goodness about him. And then, no one knows how to make meaning better than the church. To have eight or ten petitioners, all of different backgrounds, in different languages, stand up in Nationals Park in Washington, DC, and say their prayers—we don’t have to understand what they’re praying; what we understand is that we are one people.
Image: You’ve written that what faith is after is not comfort but salvation. What does it mean if we ever start feeling uncomfortable about these issues?
TL: I don’t see myself as outside the church on this. I can’t stop being Catholic. It is a gift and a language; it was given to me. I’m not one of those fellows that would say, “I think I’ll be an Episcopalian now.” I might be Jewish someday, because I like the idea of a chosen people. But I think Catholics and Jews are very much the same people. I think Christians and Jews are one people.
In the same place I wrote that, I also said, if we all believe in one God, then do the math. I’ve belonged to a men’s Bible study for twenty years, and for twenty years we’ve fought over the question of whether we’re all praying to the same God. I have to believe that whoever God is, God hears all our prayers and speaks all our languages. At a papal mass in Nationals Park, many languages are used, and that is proper. Whoever God is, God hears all our petitions. But I believe I was given to pray in the way the Irish Roman Catholic Church taught me. I believe these things were all gifts—though they each come with a certain disorder.
Image: Irish Catholicism as I understand it has a tradition of treating the priest as a prince among men, but you can be pretty tart about things that you think deserve it. How would you describe the Irish Catholicism of your own experience?
TL: I think we can talk about two different experiences. The American Catholic Church is very much an Irish church. That flood of starving Irish that came here in the nineteenth century changed the landscape of religion in this country. But what has happened to the Catholic Church in Ireland in the twentieth century has been so dramatic it would take your breath away. It could be said that vocation follows famine. The church is blossoming in Africa right now in many ways because of the horrors of famine and political upheaval there, and this is probably why the Irish church sent so many priests and teachers out to the world. If you became a prince of the church, you were going to be fed for the rest of your life. That was the sociology of it. My great-grandfather is a fairly good example. He came here from Ireland, and he had three children. One became a teacher, one became a civil servant with the post office, and one became a priest. This was like hitting the trifecta for a man who left a stony county of Ireland, because each of those jobs came with a pension. None of his children was going to starve. Can I say that my grand-uncle the priest had more faith than his sister the teacher or his brother the postal worker? Hard to know. It’s a different pilgrimage. Our family life is defined in many ways by the pilgrimage of that priest. We are what we are and we do what we do because of a dead priest. His pilgrimage, including his pilgrimage home to Ireland for burial, is what made my father at twelve decide to be a funeral director. Some days I think God was working these things out for us, and other days I think God was just nodding and smiling and letting these things happen. I don’t know and I don’t need to know at this point. But as a person of faith I have to believe that wonder and doubt are articles of that faith. I have to ask questions.
Image: You maintain a home in Ireland. I hear they’re calling it the Celtic Tiger. What has all the recent economic change there done to the culture?
TL: Materialism has replaced an awful lot. But what happened to the church there is not only that the economy took off. The priestly scandals also changed things. In 1986, Ireland had a referendum to make divorce legal. Everybody in Dublin voted for it, the rest of the country voted against it, and it failed two to one. Then they held it again in 1995 and it passed. In that short time, the economy had changed, and the power of the priest had changed. The initial versions of the scandals had broken, including the Bishop Casey scandal. I suppose it was a little bit like the printing press and the first Bible. When people began to get access to prosperity, the church just didn’t make as much sense to them. I believe they’ll come back to it. The church at its best responds to something deeply human in us, even if it’s something pagan by our reckoning. Saint Patrick was a great Christian missionary because he knew how to borrow from pagan things. I think the Irish church was nearly pagan in some lovely ways.
Image: So how about closer to home? How is Milford faring these days?
TL: Michigan is in difficult straights because of the failing auto industry, but that’s not new. We had what they used to call a one-state recession up until about three weeks ago, and now we’re simply leading the way. But Milford is doing fine, I’d say. We’re okay. People come and go. As for our country as a whole, I hope the pope’s visit was remedial. I think our country is in a very bad way. I think people feel a sense of disenfranchisement and embarrassment. Here we are, six years into an elective war (and those seem like oxymoronic terms to me). I think that we have some guilt and shame to deal with, and that we should pray for peace.
Image: Well, it is an election year. Are we likely to get anything better than we’ve got now?
TL: I think people of faith ought to feel betrayed by what’s happened over the past seven years, and I’m sure they do. I’m angered and outraged. Among the men I go to Bible study with, this is not a conversation we bring up anymore because it’s hurtful to people who voted for this man, who saw in him that on-your-sleeve religiosity that would mean we’d have prayer in school and an end to abortion and all this other stuff that was never going to happen. But because he was one of us, we thought all would be okay. I can’t assign motives to anybody, but what has happened has been, I would say, sinful. To the extent that my citizenship makes me party to it, I feel ashamed. I think we’re in trouble. We’re distanced from our civic duties. I think we could do no worse. Whatever happens in this next election, it’ll give us a chance to stand back and take account. I don’t have any question about what I’m going to be doing.
Image: You’ve done a number of commentaries for National Public Radio and several op-ed columns for the New York Times, where you’ve addressed some of these political issues, though often in an oblique, personal way, rather than head-on. Do you have a particular hope for what you can do in these more mainstream, public-square venues, as opposed to in your books?
TL: I do feel that writers should be part of the conversation. There I agree with Naomi Wolf. The idea that writers ought to turn their citizenship over to a professional class of politicians and media or policy wonks I think is mistaken, particularly nowadays when there are so many forums from which to speak.
The New York Times first called me about writing a piece on the Unknown Soldier from Vietnam, and the ethical question of whether we should allow science to settle his identity. I told them I could think about it and write something out, and they said, “Good. Do so by five o’clock tomorrow and do 850 words of it.” I said, “I’m an artist. What are you going to do for me?” They said, “We’ll give you a million and a half readers.”
As I see it, my job isn’t to tell them to do this or do that, but to get them to think about an issue in a new way. The essayist’s chore is to present mystery in a way that gets people to think in something other than an either/or sense. I think about reproductive choices and capital punishment and our body politic, and I’d like to write about them in a way that makes other people think differently, even for ten minutes.
Image: Does Michigan have its own muse? Is there anything that characterizes the Michigan writer?
TL: We certainly have no shortage of writers in Michigan. I’m happy to have a connection to a lot of them. Somebody did bring up the idea of having a poet laureate for Michigan, but it never even came to a vote. The idea couldn’t get past the first legislative committee, which I think may be good. We have a rust belt mentality in some ways, but we also have a beautiful state, northern Michigan in particular. That ours is a peninsular existence might have something to do with why we are the way we are. We can find ourselves on the map. We might be lost otherwise, but we can hold our left hand up, palm away from us, and say, “I’m there, at the knuckle of the index finger.”
Image: You’re doing a bit of teaching now. Is that something new for you?
TL: Since 2000, every other year for one semester, I teach a nonfiction workshop at the University of Michigan in their graduate program. I always have mixed feelings about it. These are talented students, smarter than I am and far better educated, and they learn faster. To be among them is a challenge and a treat. As far as I’m concerned, teaching takes the same energies that I would use writing. I’ve never figured out how people can write and teach at the same time. When I teach, I figure I’m not going to be writing that semester, and that’s proved to be the case.
Image: You’re a distinguished practitioner of several genres, but you first came to wide public knowledge as a writer of creative nonfiction. Do you think much about the genre itself? Do you think about these recurring scandals with people being called out for fictionalizing where they’re supposedly memoirizing? Do you think about the health of the form, or is that a level of self-consciousness that’s not interesting to you?
TL: It’s interesting to me that these things happen. My wife and I each read some of James Frey’s book. She was impressed, but when I read it I said, “This isn’t so.” He runs into trouble where he starts making up things to expand his own identity within the story. I and other essayists have often created composite characters so as to keep anyone’s identity from being recognized. I could not have written The Undertaking without getting permission from some people and making composites of others.
For me, Montaigne is the best example. As long as you’re following his rules about writing essays, I think you’re okay. But you can’t just make stuff up, as in the case of this young woman who claimed to be a gang member raised by a foster mother in South Central Los Angeles and turned out to be a quiet Episcopalian girl from a well-to-do family. Just call that a novel, let people read away and have a good time. I used to have a tidy set of rules for how to distinguish when you’ve crossed this line, though I can’t remember them off the top of my head.
I do like working in different genres. I think Frost was right about poetry, that it should be an adventure, a setting forth. It always has been for me. When I start a poem, I don’t know the outcome. I haven’t a clue. I just let the language do its job. The same is true with essaying. Essaying is searching, looking around. You go from one sentence to the next, and on and on until something makes better sense to you. When it rings true to you, you hope it will ring true to others. The more targeted kinds of writing, like op-ed pieces, are useful exercises, but they are not the same as essaying in Montaigne’s sense.
Image: You’ve written about the importance of poetry in the larger republic of letters and in society as a whole. I’ve gathered that a lot of your inspiration has come from relationships you’ve developed with British and Irish poets. More so than American poets?
TL: It’s easy to get to know a handful of really fine Irish poets, since that’s a smaller place than America. I’ve been fortunate, in the time that I’ve spent there, to meet an awful lot of them—although the standing army of Irish poets doesn’t get much below five thousand these days, so I’ve only met a fraction of a fraction of them. But it is easier to know their work and to survey their place in their national community of writers, and the same is true of Scottish and English and Welsh writers. I’ve felt fortunate to have a British publisher and reason enough to be over there a lot.
Image: I see the positive value of knowing a community of writers, of sensing the theme and variations that their likenesses and unlikenesses provide you as food for your own work. Is there anything in poetic circles these days that distresses you or irks you, or is it all positive?
TL: I don’t think I’m qualified to speak about poetic circles. I don’t feel connected to the poetry business here in America, and I just don’t have time for the politics of poetry nowadays. To me it’s much ado about nothing. In the real world, all of us who claim to be poets are ignored with impunity. People think of poets as nice to have around doing that stuff, as long as we don’t have to read any of it. So the people who publish poetry, yourself included, are heroes as far as I’m concerned.
But I have maintained correspondences with a handful of poets, and their work often inspires mine. I think of my friend Michael Heffernan, with whom I’ve had a lifelong correspondence, oftentimes in poetry. We’ve gotten to the point where we’re both older, crankier, and more stubborn, and about the only thing we can do now is write poems to each other. When we’re together we’ll end up fighting about one thing or another—politics, women, drink. But when I get one of his poems in the mail, I feel duty-bound to respond to it. He sends one called “Purple,” and I send one back called “Red.” I’m challenged to do things I wouldn’t otherwise do. For forty years now, I’ve been corresponding with him. Same with Matthew Sweeney. Matthew Sweeney writes poems I could never write, but I’m so delighted to get them in the mail. Dennis O’Driscoll, too. I’ve been trying to figure out how to say how much I appreciate this long poem of his called “The Bottom Line.” It’s a wonderful tour de force about modern Ireland that I’ve never been able to better, so I just keep reading it over and over.
Image: I understand you’re writing fiction now.
TL: Yes. It remains to be seen whether my publisher publishes it, but it’s exciting to me. To live in fiction is fun. I’ve spent most of the last four years trying to get some stories together, and I ended up with a novella about a Methodist minister in Finley, Ohio. My brothers would call me and ask what I was doing, and I’d say, “I’m in Finley,” and they’d hang up. It was that much fun for me. With writing, a lot of the time you walk around looking for any diversion, praying for someone to call and say, “Would you like to go have a cheeseburger?” But then when you are doing it and it’s working, it’s joyous. You can feel like you’ve done a day’s work.
I’m pleased with the collection, but I have a Scots editor, so we’ll see. I thought I was done two years ago, and he said, “No, I want it to be longer.” Now it’s done as far as I’m concerned, and I’ve sent it to him and to my editor in New York, fashionably late, and I’m pleased with it, and one or two really bookish people whom I trust are pleased with it. Both my editors are really fine poets, which is the good news and the bad news, because they take their work very seriously. The stories have been published in good places, so I know they’ve been vetted by other careful readers of fiction, but until I have a green light from these guys I’m never quite sure. Robin Robertson has been my editor since ’92, but there are no guarantees. He has high standards. Working both with him in the UK and with Jill Bialosky here, there is this alchemy they produce.
Image: You wrote a beautiful and mysterious meditation in the introduction to Bodies in Motion and at Rest about Saint Paul’s discussion of circumcision, of all things. You generate a lot of profundity with a seemingly unlikely subject, this delicate operation that brings people together and keeps them apart, making it a kind of metaphor for the way religion and politics can bring people together and keep them apart. At the very end, you write, “A thing well worth knowing is where to cut.” At the risk of killing the mystery, I’m tempted to ask you to extrapolate a bit more.
TL: It borrows from a poem I wrote about one of the first surgical theaters in London, at Saint Thomas’s Hospital, part of Guy’s Hospital under London Bridge. There they have a museum called the Old Operating Theatre, which is a seventeenth-century surgery, with a table and a blade and a bucket, and these amphitheatric seats where the apprentice surgeons would sit and watch. I gave a reading there, and later I wrote this poem. I was trying to talk about how it’s in rooms like this that all the mysteries play themselves out. The early Christians would have knelt in a room like that to act out the liturgy of body and blood. And surgery is a kind of holy, mysterious art, practiced by high priests of a different sort. Abraham, guided by God, establishes the law that this cut is how you become the chosen people. How does God think of this thing? I can just imagine Abraham’s tribesmen hearing this and running off into the desert. Then, to me, knowing where to cut is knowing how to edit, knowing how to measure the message, knowing when enough is enough, when to stop.
Image: Have I missed anything you’d like to say more about?
TL: Thanks to you for the special mission Image has taken up. It’s very unlikely, when you think of it, trying to throw all these things in the same soup. I was talking to a funeral director from Raleigh-Durham a couple of weeks ago, and I told him I was going out to the west coast because I was getting a very nice award from Image. “I love Image!” he said. How many funeral directors are reading Image, I wondered? Then it occurred to me that they should all have it, as I do at the library at our funeral home. It keeps turning up dog-eared. People are reading it. May it last forever.
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.
Thomas P. Lynch
b. 1948
Robert Turney
Essayist, poet, and funeral director Thomas Lynch has written four critically acclaimed volumes of poetry, three award-winning volumes of essays, and a book of short fiction. By using his own daily routine as poetic fodder, Lynch has transformed the mundane task of preparing the dead into a life-affirming event. His lyrical, elegaic poems describe the dead citizens of Milford, Michigan, his own family relationships, and scenes and myths from his Irish Catholic upbringing. Sometimes described as a cross between Garrison Keillor and W.B. Yeats, Lynch’s work dissects the vicissitudes of the human experience with grace and wit. His first collection of poems, Skating with Heather Grace (1986), is set in Michigan, Ireland, and Italy. Library Journal reviewer Rosaly DeMaios Roffman found that the poems "unpretentiously rehearse the dreams of the dying as they celebrate the everchanging relationships of the living." Lynch, according to Roffman, crafts poems that weave symbolism and mythology into the human experience.
Lynch’s subsequent volumes of poetry, including Grimalkin and Other Poems (1994), Still Life in Milford (1998), Walking Papers (2010), and The Sin-Eater: A Breviary (2011), likewise contain elements of the poet's professional and personal life mixed with his ruminations about Irish culture and history.
A well-known essayist and contributor to publications like the New York Times, the London Times, Newsweek, and Harper’s, Lynch’s essays offer a fascinating peak into a profession few of us have ever imagine. The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade (1997) reflects the author's "eloquent, meditative observations on the place of death in small-town life," according to a critic in Kirkus Reviews. Lynch's poetic vision is indelibly colored by his undertaking business, and what he sees often contrasts with what lies on the surface. Dispelling the myths about people in his trade, Lynch wrote, "I am no more attracted to the dead than the dentist is to your bad gums, the doctor to your rotten innards, or the accountant to your sloppy expense records." His profession has provided Lynch not only with a living, but with a unique vantage point from which to observe the entire cycle of life. The book won the Heartland Prize for Non-Fiction, the American Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Lynch's prose book Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality (2000) explores his Roman Catholic childhood and family, being a father, and the relationship between "mortuary and literary arts." In 2005 Lynch published Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans, a memoir-travelogue and cultural exploration of the ties that bind two countries with inextricably linked histories. His foray into short fiction, Apparition and Late Fictions (2010) addresses themes found in his poetry and essays, offering sensitive portraits of ordinary people coping with grief.
Lynch has received numerous awards and grants from the National Book Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Michigan Council for the Arts and the Irish Arts Council. A frequent guest lecturer at universities across North America, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Australia, he is an adjunct professor in creative writing at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. He divides his time between his home in Milford, Michigan and his ancestral home in Moveen, County Clare, Ireland.
Thomas Lynch. The Sin-Eater: A Breviary. Paraclete Press. With photographs by Michael Lynch, art by Sean Lynch.
Readers of Thomas Lynch's fifth book of poetry, The Sin-Eater , need not be undertakers, Catholics, or even descendants of Irish immigrants to America, as Lynch himself is, to appreciate this artful collection of twenty-four poems and twenty-six black-and-white photographs of western Ireland, incomparably prefaced by an essay the author calls "Introit." This beginning prose piece reveals how the poet-undertaker became who he is--and in the richness of telling almost makes the reader become him too.
Who is the sin-eater? Not the poet but his primitive creation, Argyle, who has appeared in Lynch's earlier collections from time to time, drawn from a haunting figure in Irish folkways. Lynch tells how he "met" this strange man once while his sons were watching an old swashbuckler on television. The boys' father, half dozing in his chair, woke to a startling scene in which an odd and tattered fellow, "part pirate, part panhandler," stood over a laid-out corpse, then "swilled beer from a wooden bowl and tore at a heel of bread with his teeth." For this act, which "ate" the heavy sins of the dead, the man was given a sixpence for saving the deceased from burdened wandering. Now Argyle is the one who wanders, walking from funeral to funeral, meal to meal. Lynch tells how he learned more about this figure in a classic history of funeral directing, and how as reader he developed a kind of haunted kinship and sympathy for the scruffy pilgrim "trying to find his way home."
The book's striking cover photograph of a dark tower-house perched above the sea seems to bid readers to come into the poems if they dare, to listen to the inner voice of Argyle as rendered by his re-creator. The first poem of the twenty-four, all of which speak with an easy iambic lilt and lovely plainness, introduces the sin-eater at work in his calling after a death in the town. He is "a narrow, hungry man whose laughter / and the wicked upturn of his one eyebrow / put the local folks in mind of trouble."
The poems that follow reveal Argyle variously "vaporous and sore at heart ... a spectacle of shortfall and desire," balanced by dreams of both youthful lust and future death. He is a friendless wanderer in the poem "Argyle's Retreat," taking a much-needed rest by the sea where "Great hosts of basking sharks and shoals of mackerel" swim together like brethren, not like predator and prey. Argyle sees "signs and wonders everywhere," and in another poem beseeches the ancient Irish saint-in-exile Columba to "intercede with God to send a Sign that I might know my bilious ministry / serves both the sinner and The Sinned Against!"
Inevitably, Argyle represents superstition to jealous priests. He is even "inquisitioned," according to Lynch's playful diction, until the sin-eater talks back, grinning, with a couplet: "You keep your pope and robes and host and chalice. / Leave me my loaf and bowl and taste for malice." But in truth, Argyle suffers from "God hunger," asking himself, "What makes this aching in the soul?" He gets no answer except an unexpected baptism by what he calls a "churchdove" flying out of fog. After a journey to the Holy Isle of Iona in Scotland, he wears one of its green stones around his neck as ballast, as anchor, to calm his inner storms as he roams the "outposts and edges.... much scorned by men, put upon by weather." The sin-eater plods on in "Argyle at Loop Head," mulling over his task:
The bodies of the dead he dined over never troubled Argyle but still their souls went with him into exile and, reincarnate as gulls and plovers, dove from high headlands over the ocean in fits of hopeful flight, much as heaven was said to require a leap of faith into the fathomless and unbeknownst.
Perhaps the central poem in this collection is "Argyle's Eucharist," in which the sin-eater stands over the "measly loaf and stingy goblet" and recognizes "his lot in life like priesthood after all." In another poem, "He Considers Not the Lilies But Their Excellencies," the sin-eater admits that although he has scorned "episcopal vexations, contumely and bamboozles... Some days he felt so happily haunted, / by loving ghosts and gods upholding him." Nevertheless, "Some days he felt entirely alone." Here the reader is invited to recognize the riddle-like truth of a parallel priesthood, enacted by both the great and the humble, both with ups and downs. But typical of poet-Lynch, who is a man who does not suffer sanctimony lightly, his creation, the sin-eater, ends the feast in "Argyle's Eucharist" with a belch.
Through the voice of his ragged pilgrim, the poet questions his own inability to discern the plan of "Whoever Is In Charge Here," notwithstanding all those dear old hymns of "blessed assurance." The sin-eater ends his pilgrimage by surveying land and sea from the hill of Knocknagaroon, with the vast Atlantic Ocean on one side, the Shannon River's wide mouth on the other. Then his vision focuses on the smaller green townland of Moveen, where Lynch himself owns a legacy cottage. His rough kinsman Argyle concludes in bliss, "It seemed he occupied the hand of God: / open, upturned, outstretched, uplifting him."
The book's low-key but meaningful subtitle, "A Breviary" (a term which denotes the essential scriptures and incantations used by Catholic priests), also suggests another kind of breviary created by the sin-eater's mission-path. In the collection's final poem, Lynch introduces a surprise helpmate for the lonely Argyle. Named "Recompense," this unholy-holy companion is "a piebald donkey / bequeathed him by a sad-eyed parish priest / whose sins he supped away one Whitsunday ..." This concluding poem dubs the donkey the sin-eater's "paraclete," a word derived from Latin and Greek for "one sent to help." In other words, the Holy Spirit. This ending leaves in the reader's consciousness a modest but mighty blessing "of all vast creation reconciled / in one last spasm of forgiveness" as man and beast turn together toward the sea. A nonbeliever might picture here Don Quixote, with his broken-down horse, Rosinante. But what Christian reader would fail to think of the Passion story?
It's appropriate, then, that The Sin-Eater is published by Paraclete Press, an ecumenical monastic community in the Benedictine tradition. The collection is published as well by Salmon Press in Ireland. For Thomas Lynch, this mixed-genre collection of poetry, essay, and art is clearly a labor of love, a manifest sharing of family and spirit. The iconic photographs by the author's son Michael Lynch and a painting by another son, artist Sean Lynch, add many levels of meaning to a book of mostly joyous testimony.
Readers: Fear not that this book is a prudish religious tract from a boy whose family wanted him to be a priest. Providing services for grieving people is also a calling that men of the Lynch family, along with a ghost named Argyle, have answered willingly and successfully. And surely poetry is appropriate for this mission, itself a kind of paraclete. The book offers a splendid melding of language, vision, voice, and agape love. It is a gift--a richly imaginative work tinged with rascally humor and suffused with those "doubts and wonders" that produce awe: a reading that is both entertaining and profound.
Benedict, Elinor
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 University of Nebraska Press
http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/
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Benedict, Elinor. "Thomas Lynch. The Sin-Eater: A Breviary." Prairie Schooner, vol. 86, no. 2, 2012, p. 169+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A293353911/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=90e4abbf. Accessed 13 Jan. 2020.
The Depositions: New and Selected Essays on Being and Ceasing to Be. By Thomas Lynch. Nov. 2019. 352p. Norton, $27.95 (9781324003977). 100.
The role of a funeral director is more than a vocation to Lynch; he considers it to be both an artistic endeavor and a human responsibility. Lynch expresses this calling as "serving the living by caring for the dead." In this compelling collection of new and previously published pieces reaching back decades, Lynch explores death as it seizes people in different places and different ways. He includes the stories of family members, some who were on death's precipice and many whom he prepared for funerals. These candid, eloquent, and often humorous essays examine the funeral industry and signify in fresh ways the connection between the living and dying. Lynch also observes spiritual rituals of diverse cultures as they prepare the dead for mourning, and he shares insights into how faith comforts the grieving. Several essays highlight his many trips to Ireland in an effort to reclaim his heritage and family history. By delving both into his own life and society's norms, writer, poet, and small-town funeral director Lynch reminds us to accept the frailties of life and the mystery of death.
--Elizabeth Joseph
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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MLA 8th Edition APA 6th Edition Chicago 17th Edition
Joseph, Elizabeth. "The Depositions: New and Selected Essays on Being and Ceasing to Be." Booklist, 1 Nov. 2019, p. 5. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A608072651/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5e31611d. Accessed 13 Jan. 2020.
The Depositions: New and Selected Essays on Being and Ceasing to Be
Thomas Lynch. Norton, $27.95 (352p) ISBN 9781-324-00397-7
This meditative, often emotionally affecting collection from funeral director, poet, and essayist Lynch (Whence and Whither) explores, with personal honesty and philosophical curiosity, the intersection of faith, death, family, and vocation. It features selections from Lynch's four previous collections, along with five new pieces. It begins with "The Undertaking," an introduction to his trade that is moving and humorous in turns--the latter, particularly, as Lynch considers people's frequent discomfort with his profession, noting, "I am no more attracted to the dead than the dentist is to your bad gums." Despite this flippant remark, Lynch explores his work as a spiritual one. In "How We Come to Be the Ones We Are," he recalls how learning Catholicism's language and rituals in childhood informed his work. In "Y2Kat," one of the standout pieces, Lynch views his first marriage's collapse through the metaphor of the ancient, seemingly immortal family cat that hates him, again expertly straddling the line between comedy and tragedy. In the new essays, Lynch contemplates the potential collapse of his second marriage and the challenge of maintaining sobriety during dark days, among other topics. Providing an excellent entry point for newcomers to Lynch's work, this assemblage is an erudite but unpretentious discussion of life and mortality by a master craftsman of language. (Dec.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"The Depositions: New and Selected Essays on Being and Ceasing to Be." Publishers Weekly, 9 Sept. 2019, p. 56. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A600790135/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1de332eb. Accessed 13 Jan. 2020.
Whence and Whither: On Lives and Living
Thomas Lynch
Westminster John Knox Press
100 Witherspoon Street, Louisville, KY 40202-1396
www.wjkbooks.com
9780664264918, $18.00, PB, 240pp, www.amazon.com
Synopsis: "Whence and Whither: On Lives and Living" is about death and the meaning of living in the form of a collection of writings about "what comes next" by funeral director, essayist and poet Thomas Lynch.
Lynch has an uncanny knack for writing about death in ways that are never morbid, always thoughtful, often humorous, and quite moving. From his account of riding in the hearse at the funeral of poet laureate Seamus Heaney, to his recounting of the funeral for a young child in the 1800s, to his compelling essay about his own mortality, Lynch always finds ways to make sense of senseless things, as he ponders what will come next.
Critique: Thoughtful and thought-provoking, informatively insightful and inherently fascinating, "Whence and Whither: On Lives and Living" is one of those books that will linger in the mind and memory long after it has been finished and set back upon the shelf. While very highly recommended for both community and academic library Death & Dying collections and supplemental studies lists, it should be noted for personal studies that "Whence and Whither: On Lives and Living" is also available in a digital book format (Kindle, $12.95).
Editorial Note: Thomas Lynch is a funeral director and writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, and Harper's, among others. He is the author of five collections of poems and four books of essays, including "The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade", which was nominated for the National Book Award in 1997. He lives in Milford, Michigan, and Moveen, County Clare, Ireland.
Mary Cowper
Reviewer
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
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Cowper, Mary. "Whence and Whither: On Lives and Living." MBR Bookwatch, June 2019. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A593919412/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e05ceccd. Accessed 13 Jan. 2020.
Whence and Whither: On Lives and Living
By Thomas Lynch
Westminster John Knox, 240 pp., $18.00 paperback
The essays in this collection are about dying as much as they are about living. As always, Thomas Lynch connects the two with eloquent prose that dips into deep faithfulness. Hovering (as he has done for decades) at the edges of the Catholic church, funeral homes, and AA meetings, Lynch brings a poetic sensibility to common questions about mortality, ethics, and the limits of human love. "Our theology is shaped by our eschatology; our living faith informed by our best hopes for the dead," he writes. The good news of Easter is always bound to the mystery of suffering, and yet "the gladness of creation outshines its griefs." Lynch glimpses this kind of radiance at the funeral of a poet, in the sagging walk of his aging dog, and in the friends who persistently show up "to save us from our hobbled, heart-wrecked selves."
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 The Christian Century Foundation
http://www.christiancentury.org
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"Whence and Whither: On Lives and Living." The Christian Century, 10 Apr. 2019, p. 43. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A583380244/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a34b49d3. Accessed 13 Jan. 2020.
‘Whence and Whither’—A Rich New Stew of Thomas Lynch’s Writings, Perfect for His Fans
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REVIEW by DAVID CRUMM
Editor of ReadTheSpirit magazine
Here’s an odd way to start a book review, recommending a new title by a favorite author, but please be forewarned: If you’ve never encountered America’s best undertaker-writer, until happening upon this review today, then I have to urge you to meet him somewhere else.
There’s his classic The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade. That was his big debut on the international stage. PBS’s Frontline series even aired a remarkable documentary, The Undertaking, which you can find now on DVD from Amazon and perhaps from your local library.
Beyond the “original” book, I also continue to pull off my bookshelf other Lynch favorites. Years ago, in the pages of this online magazine, we highlighted his fascinating 2010 collection, Apparitions & Late Fictions, which came complete with a novella.
I especially enjoy his poetry—and, even more than poetry on the printed page, opportunities to hear Lynch speak and read before an audience. A writer like Lynch is always at his best declaiming his poetry “live.” He also does a remarkable job reading his essays, adding extra texture of vocal inflections accompanied by all of the asides he loves to toss into the presentation.
So, having said that: If you have a taste for this master storyteller, poet and essayist—then by all means get this truly 5-out-of-5-stars collection.
In the volume’s introduction, Lynch makes it perfectly clear that this is a somewhat jumbled collection—bits and pieces of writing in various genres that simply needed a home between two covers in the form of a book. So you need to know that the author is offering that cautionary note himself. But the great treasure in Lynch’s work is discovering the cosmos of connections to which he points. The same thing is true here: He’s serving up a great fireside bowl of treats.
The gem in this collection, of course, is called The Black Glacier—which is his account of riding in the hearse and observing the spectacle of poet Seamus Haney’s funeral. Long-time readers of his work will naturally recall the oft-quoted final portion of his book The Undertaking. That’s where Lynch describes what he hopes for his own funeral, beginning with the words: “I’d rather it be in February. Not that it matters much to me.”
In narrating his friend Seamus’ final passage to the grave, we see something quite different than what Lynch envisioned for himself. Yet, even in that passage, Lynch’s eye and ear find the sacred—or what he describes as “Nothing out of the utterly ordinary, utterly pedestrian, a miracle.” And he simply tacks on those words “a miracle” with a wee comma because that’s how life is in Lynch’s world—the miracles roll right along with everything else. It’s ours to spot them and celebrate—or to ignore them at our peril.
There’s a whole lot in this bowl of mixed treats, but that’s my favorite. And frankly, if you stumbled on this review without knowing much about Thomas Lynch—hey, do yourself a treat and order a couple of his books!
Review: Apparition and Late Fiction: A novella and Stories by Thomas Lynch
(Cape £12.99)
February 20 2010 5:00 AM
This is an outstanding first book of prose fiction by a writer admired for his poetry and essays. A native of Michigan and a funeral director by profession, Lynch has been publishing well-regarded verse since the 1980s but first came to prominence with his 1997 collection of essays The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, notable for its elegant prose, dry wit and compassion for ordinary humanity.
"Every year, I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople," he begins the title essay, casting himself as someone who, through his chosen work, stands between "the living and the living who have died", honouring those who have passed on and offering solace to their loved ones -- a discreetly sympathetic witness to the bewilderment and anguish of human beings at their most frail and vulnerable.
He brings the same scrupulous sensitivity to the people who inhabit these five stories. In Catch and Release, 30-year-old angling instructor Danny pays homage to his father, who has died unexpectedly, by casting his ashes into the lake where they had often fished. In Bloodsport, undertaker Martin buries a young woman who's been shot dead by her brutish husband and recalls the desire he had felt for her when she was a teenager at her father's funeral. In Hunter's Moon, Harold, a sales rep for coffins, tries to make sense of his three marriages and of his troubled relationship with his daughter, wrenched from him in a train accident.
If the themes of these stories seem depressing, the treatment of them isn't. Lynch is a master of wry observation and arresting insights and his attention to the quirks of his characters ensures that they come vividly alive.
And his sympathetic range is such that, in Matinée de septembre, he can offer as protagonist a wholly persuasive career woman -- 40-year-old poet and academic Aisling who, widowed and emotionally unfulfilled, becomes infatuated by a young Jamaican waitress who's working at the island retreat where Aisling has gone for a pre-term rest.
There's high comedy here as well as a poignant understanding of human yearning and of how it can become dangerously obsessive. "On the subject of beauty," Lynch observes, "Aisling could wax eloquent, but in the presence of it she was smitten to silence."
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The 90-page novella that closes the collection and gives it its title is even finer. Methodist minister Adrian, whose wife has left after cheating on him with a younger man, embarks on a new and very successful career as self-help guru on fractured relationships: his book Good Riddance -- Divorcing for Keeps is a bestseller, as are its successors, The Good Riddance Workbook and Questions and Answers about Good Riddance. His change in circumstances is wittily evoked, but as the novella progresses Lynch reveals depths to his main character that are as engrossing as they are unexpected.
But that's true of all the stories in this superb collection.
Buy 'Apparition and Late Fictions' from Eason
Irish Independent