Background
Thomas Lynch was born on October 16, 1948, in Detroit, Michigan, United States.
Brother Rice High School, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, United States
Thomas Lynch was educated by nuns and Christian Brothers at Brother Rice High School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
Thomas Lynch
Thomas Lynch
Thomas Lynch
(The poems in this volume are all concerned, one way or an...)
The poems in this volume are all concerned, one way or another, with achieving a balance in the face of gravity. Lynch looks for this equilibrium between equal and opposing forces, such as sex and death, and love and grief - all the things that make us mortal and memorable.
https://www.amazon.com/Grimalkin-other-poems-Thomas-Lynch/dp/0224039733/?tag=2022091-20
1993
(Like all poets, inspired by death, Thomas Lynch is, unlik...)
Like all poets, inspired by death, Thomas Lynch is, unlike others, also hired to bury the dead or to 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 ear tuned to the indispensable vernaculars of love and grief. In these twelve pieces, he is the voice of both witness and functionary. Here, Lynch, poet to the dying, names the hurts and whispers the condolences and shapes the questions posed by this familiar mystery. So here is an 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 the lessons for life our mortality teaches us.
https://www.amazon.com/Undertaking-Life-Studies-Dismal-Trade/dp/0393334872/?tag=2022091-20
1997
(A collection of poems by the highly acclaimed author of T...)
A collection of poems by the highly acclaimed author of The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, a National Book Award finalist. In Still Life in Milford Thomas Lynch tenders poems on life and death, history and memory, the local and the larger geographies.
https://www.amazon.com/Still-Life-Milford-Thomas-Lynch/dp/0393319733/?tag=2022091-20
1998
(Masterful essays that illuminate not only how we die but ...)
Masterful essays that illuminate not only how we die but also how we live. Thomas Lynch, poet, funeral director, and author of the highly praised The Undertaking, winner of an American Book Award and finalist for the National Book Award, continues to examine the relations between the "literary and mortuary arts."
https://www.amazon.com/Bodies-Motion-Rest-Metaphor-Mortality-ebook/dp/B007A7UYDO/?tag=2022091-20
2000
(In thirty-five years and dozens of return trips to Irelan...)
In thirty-five years and dozens of return trips to Ireland, Thomas Lynch has found a template for the larger world inside the small one, the planet in the local parish. Part memoir, part cultural study, Booking Passage is a brilliant, often comedic guidebook for those "fellow travelers, fellow pilgrims" making their way through the complexities of their own lives and times.
https://www.amazon.com/Booking-Passage-We-Irish-Americans/dp/0393328570/?tag=2022091-20
2006
(A decade's worth of poems by one of our most reliable wit...)
A decade's worth of poems by one of our most reliable witnesses, National Book Award finalist Thomas Lynch. In his fourth collection of poems, Thomas Lynch attends to flora, fauna, and fellow pilgrims: dead poets and living masters, a former president, and his factotums, a sin-eater and inseminator. Faux-bardic and mock-epic, deft at lament and lampoon, fete and feint, Lynch's poems are powerful medicines, tonics for the long haul and home-going.
https://www.amazon.com/Walking-Papers-Poems-Thomas-Lynch/dp/0393042081/?tag=2022091-20
2010
(Heart-rending stories of life and death: a debut fiction ...)
Heart-rending stories of life and death: a debut fiction collection by the award-winning author of The Undertaking. A Methodist minister gone astray, a grieving trout bum gone fishing with his father’s remains, an artist overwhelmed by incarnate beauty - these are just a few of the iconic yet utterly unique characters in Thomas Lynch’s spirited collection. Set in Michigan’s north woods, in Ohio’s interior, on islands, in casinos, and in distant cities, these stories are linked by the gone and not forgotten: former spouses, dead parents, and missing children. In pursuit of love and its redemptions, these are pilgrims haunted by memory, dogged by desire, made radiant by romance and its denouements. With the elegant prose of Frederick Busch and the Irish sensibility of William Trevor, Lynch masterfully creates a world where mirage and apparition are commonplace, where people searching for connection and old comforts find them both near at hand and oddly out of reach.
https://www.amazon.com/Apparition-Late-Fictions-Novella-Stories/dp/0393042073/?tag=2022091-20
2010
(Thomas Lynch, funeral director, poet, and author of the N...)
Thomas Lynch, funeral director, poet, and author of the National Book Award finalist The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, 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.
https://www.amazon.com/Whence-Whither-Living-Thomas-Lynch/dp/0664264913/?tag=2022091-20
2019
Thomas Lynch was born on October 16, 1948, in Detroit, Michigan, United States.
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.
Lynch took over his father's funeral home in Milford, Michigan in 1974, a job he has held ever since. 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, elegiac 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 peek into a profession a few of us have ever imagined. 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.
(Thomas Lynch, funeral director, poet, and author of the N...)
2019(Like all poets, inspired by death, Thomas Lynch is, unlik...)
1997(In thirty-five years and dozens of return trips to Irelan...)
2006(A collection of poems by the highly acclaimed author of T...)
1998(Heart-rending stories of life and death: a debut fiction ...)
2010(The poems in this volume are all concerned, one way or an...)
1993(A decade's worth of poems by one of our most reliable wit...)
2010(A Classic Contemporary reissuing of Skating with Heather ...)
1986(Masterful essays that illuminate not only how we die but ...)
2000
Quotations:
"Grief is the tax we pay on our attachments."
"Grief is the price we pay for being close to one another. If we want to avoid our grief, we simply avoid each other."
"The realization that God could be female required the consideration that the Devil could be also."