Bone Rosary
New & Selected Poems
America’s much celebrated poet-undertaker Thomas Lynch is renowned for his thought-provoking poems on life, faith, doubt and death. This new retrospective shows the passage of his work over time, ‘a pilgrimage of sorts through growing old and facing death – subjects that caregivers know all too well. Lynch’s upfront, unvarnished style is likely to resonate with many who have come face to face with life’s most important questions’ (Mary Plummer, New York Times).
Lynch – like Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams – is a poet who writes about real things with language rooted in the everyday yet masterfully infused with power. He spent his working life as an undertaker in Midwest America, becoming in his off-hours a writer of exceptional insight with much to say about life’s questions and mysteries – big and small. Drawing on his own daily routine, he transforms the mundane task of preparing the dead into life-affirming accounts of how we live our lives. His lyrical, elegiac poems describe the dead citizens of his home town, his own family relationships, and scenes and myths from his Irish Catholic upbringing.
Poet, essayist and funeral director Thomas Lynch has published five critically acclaimed collections of poetry, four books of essays and a book of short fiction. His most recent books are The Depositions: New and Selected Essays (W.W. Norton, 2019), and Bone Rosary: New & Selected Poems (Godine, USA, 2021; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2022). A novel is forthcoming. His first four collections, Skating with Heather Grace (1987), Grimalkin & Other Poems (1994), Still Life in Milford (1998) and Walking Papers (2011), were published by Jonathan Cape in the UK, and his fifth collection, The Sin-Eater: A Breviary (2012), by Salmon Press Poetry in Ireland. Thomas Lynch has written for The Times, The Irish Times, New York Times, Newsweek, and Harper’s. His memoir The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade (1997) won the Heartland Prize for Non-Fiction, the American Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has taught at Wayne State University Department of Mortuary Science, University of Michigan Graduate Program in Writing and Emory University Candler School of Theology. His work has been the subject of two documentary films, PBS Frontline’s The Undertaking and Cathal Black’s Learning Gravity. He worked as a funeral director with the family firm Lynch & Sons in Milford, Michigan from 1973 until his recent retirement, and now divides his time between his home on Mullett Lake in Northern Michigan and his ancestral home in Moveen, Co. Clare, Ireland.
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