Apparition & Late Fictions

The first collection of fiction from the author of The Undertaking

His style has energy that takes my breath away it's so fresh and unexpected

Lynch's work is not just wonderful: it is necessary and that is a rare thing

A Methodist minister gone astray, a trout bum gone fishing with his father's ashes, an artist overwhelmed by embodied beauty-these are among the uncommon heroes and exquisite narratives in this first collection of stories by the American poet and essayist, Thomas Lynch. Set in Michigan's north woods, Ohio's interior, on islands, in casinos and distant cities, these fictions are linked by the gone and not forgotten: former spouses, dead parents, and missing children. In pursuit of love and its redemptions, Lynch's characters are haunted by memory, dogged by desire, made radiant by romance and its denouements. 
 
With the elegant prose known to the readers of his earlier work, Lynch masterfully creates a world where mirage and apparition are commonplace, where people searching for safe harbour, reconnection and old comforts find them both near at hand and oddly out of reach.

Thomas Lynch is the award winning author of three collections of poems and three books of nonfiction including The Undertaking - Life Studies from the Dismal Trade. His work has appeared in the Atlantic and New Yorker, Harper's, Granta, and Paris Review. His commentaries have appeared in the New York Times, the Irish Times and the Times and are regularly broadcast on the BBC, RTE and NPR. He lives in Milford, Michigan, and Moveen, West Clare.

A Methodist minister gone astray, a trout bum gone fishing with his father's ashes, an artist overwhelmed by embodied beauty-these are among the uncommon heroes and exquisite narratives in this first collection of stories by the American poet and essayist, Thomas Lynch. Set in Michigan's north woods, Ohio's interior, on islands, in casinos and distant cities, these fictions are linked by the gone and not forgotten: former spouses, dead parents, and missing children. In pursuit of love and its redemptions, Lynch's characters are haunted by memory, dogged by desire, made radiant by romance and its denouements. 
 
With the elegant prose known to the readers of his earlier work, Lynch masterfully creates a world where mirage and apparition are commonplace, where people searching for safe harbour, reconnection and old comforts find them both near at hand and oddly out of reach.

Bodies In Motion and At Rest

Thomas Lynch is the author of a previous collection of essays, The Undertaking, which was shortlisted for the 1997 National Book Award, and two collections of poetry: Grimalkin &amp; Other Poems (1994) and Still Life in Milford (1998). He lives and works in Milford, Michigan, where he is the funeral director, and in West Clare where he keeps an ancestral cottage.

The facts of life and death remain the same. We live and die, we love and grieve, we breed and disappear. And between these existential gravities, we search for meaning, save our memories, leave a record for those who will remember us.'So writes Thomas Lynch in Bodies in Motion and at Rest - the second collection of essays by the award-winning author of The Undertaking.As poet and funeral director, Lynch examines the relations between the literary and the mortuary arts - the connection between obsequies and prosodies; the effort to give voice to unspeakable things: great love, great heartbreak, great wonder, great pain; how icons, metaphors and ritualised speech are engaged in poems and in funerals.The essays assembled here explore a species at the intersection of millennia, beleaguered by choices and changes, encumbered by merger and acquisition, numbed by maths and technologies, in search of the meaning of Life and Time, our lives and times. In an age that seeks to define human experience in retail, high-tech or pop-psyche terms, these wise, exquisite essays explore the distance between birth and death, the condition of the human being and the state of ceasing to be.

Walking Papers

The most recent poetry collection from the author of The Undertaking, the celebrated and macabre Thomas Lynch.

An artist of great gifts, musically elevating and directing the speaking voice towards a startling power, moving through the accumulation of detail to give a visionary account of the ordinary life, doing justice to its terror and comedy. If it remains the poet's task to say things on behalf of everybody, Lynch shows how it should be done

A poet of great gifts, a humorous visionary

Like his admired Theodore Roethke, Lynch hails from Michigan - and like Roethke he can fashion long, singing lines unafraid of the old, elemental resonances of stars, roses, angels and the Latin mysteries of his Catholic childhood

Tragic, cryptic, compassionate and amusing, Lynch's poetry moves in a superb rhythm through the commonplace and the extraordinary

When roused to anger he can be pretty powerful

If life is pilgrimage, Walking Papers are the pages - the notes on the journey, news of the world, letters of introduction and dismissal - found in one's breast-pocket amongst one's effects. And Thomas Lynch, the celebrated poet-undertaker is our guide through a world that's painfully aware of its own mortality; as he says in the powerfully moving title poem: 'Listen - /something's going to get you in the end./The numbers are fairly convincing on this,/hovering, as they do, around a hundred/percent.We die.And more's the pity.' 
 
In this, his fourth collection of poems - his first in the new century - Lynch attends to the flora and 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, accusation and dispensation, fete and feint, Lynch's poems are powerful medicines, tonics for the long haul and home-going.

Thomas Lynch's poems, essays and stories have appeared in The Atlantic and Granta, Harper's and the Times (of London, New York, Ireland and L.A.) and elsewhere. He has published four poetry collections and a collection of stories, Apparition &amp; Other Late Fictions (published by Jonathan Cape), as well as works of non-fiction, including The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade. He lives in Milford, Michigan and in Moveen, West Clare.

If life is pilgrimage, Walking Papers are the pages - the notes on the journey, news of the world, letters of introduction and dismissal - found in one's breast-pocket amongst one's effects. And Thomas Lynch, the celebrated poet-undertaker is our guide through a world that's painfully aware of its own mortality; as he says in the powerfully moving title poem: 'Listen - /something's going to get you in the end./The numbers are fairly convincing on this,/hovering, as they do, around a hundred/percent. We die. And more's the pity.' 
 
In this, his fourth collection of poems - his first in the new century - Lynch attends to the flora and 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, accusation and dispensation, fete and feint, Lynch's poems are powerful medicines, tonics for the long haul and home-going.

We Irish & Americans

Booking Passage

'I'm in awe of Thomas Lynch's way with language: the plain-spoken honesty of this poet's prose' - Elmore Leonard

A curious and engaging series of pieces which retain a personal and historical flavour...while he is excellent on Irish history and the immigrant experience

By turns diverting, evocative and provocative, Booking Passage gets to grips with all the muddle and multiplicity of its author's lifelong concerns. It does so, to our enjoyment, in a spirit of discernment and delight'

There are some beautiful observations about what it means to embrace a new culture, while holding on to, and romanticising, an old one...[with] lyrical and moving descriptions of Ireland, Irishness and the linguistic consequences of American cultural imperialism

Beautifully written in a masterly style with the poet's touch on every page

In February of 1970, Thomas Lynch, aged twenty-one, bought a one-way ticket to Ireland. He landed in the townland of Moveen, at the edge of the ocean in West Clare, outside the thatched cottage that his great-grandfather had left late in the nineteenth century with a one-way ticket to America. Tommy and Nora Lynch, Thomas Lynch's elderly, unmarried, distant cousins welcomed the young American 'home'. In the words of the author, 'it changed my life'. 
 
Booking Passage is part travelogue, part cultural study, part memoir and elegy, part guidebook for what Lynch calls 'fellow pilgrims' working their way through their own and the larger histories. It is a magnificent hymn of praise to Ireland.

Life Studies from the Dismal Trade

The Undertaking

These craggy "life studies," forged during his years in the "dismal trade," are always forceful, authentic and full of a kind of ethical and esthetic clarity.

'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 &amp; Other Poems (1994). His poems and essays have appeared in the London Review of Books and The New Yorker.

Like all poets, inspired by death, Lynch is, unlike others, also hired to bury the dead or 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 ears tuned to the indispensable vernaculars of love and grief. In these twelve essays is the voice of both witness and functionary. Lynch stands between 'the living and the living who have dies' with the same outrage and amazement, straining for the same glimpse we all get of what mortality means to a vital species. So here is 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 essays of rare elegance and grace, full of fierce compassion and rich in humour and humanity - lessons taught to the living by the dead.

Grimalkin And Other Poems

'It is a great pleasure to have his powerful poems finally available this side of the Atlantic' - Matthew Sweeney

Thomas Lynch is at pains to seem the guileless author of poems which simply end up in remarkable proximity to their subjects. In fact he is an artist of great gifts, musically elevating and directing the speaking voice towards a startling power, moving through the accumulation of detail to give a visionary account of ordinary life, doing justice to its error and comedy. If it remains the poet's task to say thigns on behalf of everybody, Lynch shows us how it shoud be done

Thomas Lynch looks into the eyes of corpses and sees their lives and their difficult loves that remind him of his own. And he manages to do this with humour and grace

He can fashion long, singing lines unafraid of the old elemental resonances of stars, roses, angels, the Latin mysteries of his Catholic childhood

His stately ruminations... mediate between the poles of innocent joy and ultimate disaster without tipping over in either direction

This thoughtful volume is neither too sentimental nor too clinical about death's role (and the author's) in our lives

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 &amp; 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.

The poems in Grimalkin - Thomas Lynch's first publication in Britain are all concerned, in one way or another, with achieving a balance in the face of gravity. In each poem, Lynch is looking for this equilibrium between equal and opposing forces: the gravities of sex and death, love and grief - all the things that make us breathless and horizontal, mortal and memorable. 
 
By means of a wry, mordant wit, telling observation and glorious poise, we are shown the strong tensions that make us human: the forces in our nature that create, replicate, restore, renew us; and those that kill us, constrict our lives, silence us. From spirited invective to meditations on morality, from lyrics of love and desire to a corrosive flyting to his ex-wife, these poems explore an extraordinary emotional range and technical facility but, more importantly, they reveal a compassionate, wise, and genial humanity.

Thomas Lynch

Like his admired Theodore Roethke, Lynch hails from Michigan - and like Roethke he can fashion long, singing lines unafraid of the old elemental resonances of stars, roses, angels, the Latin mysteries of his Catholic childhood... A mavellous, life-giving collection

In Still Life in Milford, Lynch casts the cold eye we are told to on life and death, history and memory, the local and the larger geographics. Examining the dynamics of faith, remembrance, and intimate conduct, these poems are informed by end times, tribulations and visions that make up the ordinary enterprise of daily life. 
 
Colloquy and narrative, soliloquy and tribute, Still Life in Milford engages the full register of the poet's voices as elegist, eulogist, obituarist, straight man and passer-by to achieve a difficult and inimitable harmony.

Thomas Lynch

Praise for Still Life In Milford

A poet of great gifts, a humorous visionary

Like his admired Theodore Roethke, Lynch hails from Michigan - and like Roethke he can fashion long, singing lines unafraid of the old elemental resonances of stars, roses, angels, the Latin mysteries of his Catholi ...

A fine and accomplished poet

A poet of great gifts, a humorous visionary

Like his admired Theodore Roethke, Lynch hails from Michigan - and like Roethke he can fashion long, singing lines unafraid of the old elemental resonances of stars, roses, angels, the Latin mysteries of his Catholi ...

A fine and accomplished poet

A poet of great gifts, a humorous visionary

Like his admired Theodore Roethke, Lynch hails from Michigan - and like Roethke he can fashion long, singing lines unafraid of the old elemental resonances of stars, roses, angels, the Latin mysteries of his Catholi ...

A fine and accomplished poet

Books by Thomas Lynch

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