Description
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 resolate 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 of his home town, his own family relationships, and scenes and myths from his Irish Catholic upbringing.







Selected Poetry
New and Selected Poems, Volume Two
The Moon Before Morning
The Pope's Mustard-Maker: a comic operetta in three acts
The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here
Book of Mercy
The Art of Derek Walcott
Bedouin Of The London Evening: Collected Poems
Hansel and Gretel
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
Milk and Honey
About Poems and How Poems Are Not About
Ten Pre-Raphaelite Poems
52 Ways of Looking At a Poem
New and Selected Poems. Volume One
Somewhere Else Entirely
The World-Ending Fire
Lotus Gatherers
Days of Grace
The Sun of Hereafter
Comic Poems
Music Lessons: Newcastle / Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures
Dog Poems
I May Be Stupid But I'm Not That Stupid
Luck Is the Hook
Then What