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. – Richard Bernstein * New York Times *

Thomas Lynch is an American poet. Like all poets, inspired by death, Lynch is 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 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 & Other Poems (1994). His poems and essays have appeared in the London Review of Books and The New Yorker.

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