- Paperback: 240 pages
- Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd (11 May 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0224059041
- ISBN-13: 978-0224059046
- Product Dimensions: 19 x 11.4 x 2.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,322,114 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
By the award-winning author of "The Undertaking", this second collection of Lynch's essays examines the relations between the literary and the mortuary arts, a relationship on which he has a unique perspective, being both a poet and a funeral director.
About the Author
Thomas Lynch is the author of three collections of essays, Bodies in Motion and at Rest, The Undertaking, which was shortlisted for the 1997 National Book Award, and Booking Passage. His poetry collections include Grimalkin & Other Poems and Still Life in Milford. He lives and works in Milford, Michigan, where he is the funeral director, and in West Clare where he keeps an ancestral cottage.
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First Sentence
So I'm over at the Hortons' with my stretcher and mini-van and my able apprentice, young Matt Sheffler, because they found old George, the cemetery sexton, dead in bed this Thursday morning in ordinary time. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
So I'm over at the Hortons' with my stretcher and mini-van and my able apprentice, young Matt Sheffler, because they found old George, the cemetery sexton, dead in bed this Thursday morning in ordinary time. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book can't fail to move and engage you. His perfect sense of word use and word play leave you feeling that a great poet is reading aloud to you. His meditations and revelations on life and living always involve and amuse, whilst never losing their their ability to move you deeply. Simply essential reading.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
10 reviews
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Missing Only the Element of Surprise
19 Mar 2004
Format:Paperback
If you have read and enjoyed Lynch's "The Undertaking", you will not be disappointed in this book. If not, I suggest reading "Undertaking" first. This collection of essays covers a variety of topics. Lynch is delightfully unafraid to follow his own logic, even if that makes his conclusions far outside of what passes today for mainstream opinion.
The only negative I can give is that the book does not surprise you as much as his first book did. How could it? To me, that simply shows Lynch's unique contribution. These essays are a bit longer and more varied. Some of them are based on talks Lynch has given on the lecture circuit for morticians. One such is my favorite. Lynch notes that he is viewed with some suspicion by both poets and funeral directors, and insightfully compares the poem and the funeral. Very well done!
15 of 20 people found the following review helpful
On Metaphor and Mortality
16 Jun 2000
Format:Hardcover
Reading Thomas Lynch's essays brings you closer to knowing the importance of living. His poetic observances and proximity to death as an undertaker make for a rare sensibility and we, the readers, are lucky he has been thoughtful enough to share them with us.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
GOOD PROSE STYLE WITH CONVENTIONAL RELIGIOUS VIEWS
3 Mar 2012
Format:Paperback
Thomas Lynch writes catchy, well-tuned sentences. He's in company with the poet Hayden Carruth and personal essayist Phillip Lapote. Reading this book in 2000, I was a little non-plussed by Lynch's Catholicism and belief in God, however, religious views that he kept out of his first book of essays, "The Undertaking." If these bromidic conventional religious views were there in his first book, they weren't at all noticeable. Here, they are unavoidable, and they weaken his essays if only because his views are merely conventional. They or their expression in these essays are the only aspect that mars his otherwise good sense and his fine prose style.
The most spirited of these essays is "Y2 Cat," an essay about his hatred of a certain cat. His anger, ire and even his rage is amusing. His voice and timing make it impossible for him to be misunderstood. The cat, you see, is a leftover remnant of his relationship to his ex-wife. In another essay named "Reno," Thomas Lynch writes about poetry and the use of words, the respect he has for words and metaphors such that what he writes demonstrates he is a poet after all while also showing the common denominators between being a poet and being a funeral director.
This reader marvels how the author who daily works with death nonetheless maintains a strong, down home sense of humor.
The most spirited of these essays is "Y2 Cat," an essay about his hatred of a certain cat. His anger, ire and even his rage is amusing. His voice and timing make it impossible for him to be misunderstood. The cat, you see, is a leftover remnant of his relationship to his ex-wife. In another essay named "Reno," Thomas Lynch writes about poetry and the use of words, the respect he has for words and metaphors such that what he writes demonstrates he is a poet after all while also showing the common denominators between being a poet and being a funeral director.
This reader marvels how the author who daily works with death nonetheless maintains a strong, down home sense of humor.
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