If you Google the name “Thomas Lynch,” the first listing that comes
up is the title and cover image of a book called The
Undertaking. The second is Lynch’s personal website, which
lists his occupations like a business card: poet, writer, essayist,
funeral director. In his native Milford, Michigan, Lynch runs the
business started by his father, Lynch & Sons (motto: “A Family
Tradition of Dignified Service”). He’s quite possibly the only person
to have ever been a featured speaker at both poetry conferences and
undertakers’ conventions. And he’s a gorgeous stylist who brings a
lilied scent of death and a generous sense of life to everything he
writes.
Lynch has written three poetry collections full of ornate beauty. He
writes the kind of poems that would be the perfect balm for the reader
who fell off the poetry wagon back in 10th grade while
feverishly trying to memorize “O Captain! My Captain!” for a graded
test. From Lynch’s “A Note on the Rapture to His True Love”: “From a
sunlit room/I watch my neighbor’s sugar maple turn/to shades of gold.
It’s late September. Soon…/Soon as I’m able I intend to turn/To gold
myself.” It’s just the kind of stately image that you’d expect from an
undertaker.
But then, later in the same poem, after the death imagery, comes
the lust: “Anyway, I’d like to get my hands on/you. I’d like to
kiss your eyelids and make love/as if it were our last time, or the
first,/or else the one and only form of love/divisible by which I yet
remain myself.”
The poems are revealing, but it’s Lynch’s three books of essays that
illuminate why he’s so devoted to two of the most thankless
jobs in the world. The quiet revelations that blossom throughout
his poems are in the essays, too—”The poor cousin of fear is
anger”—but the essays are where he writes more candidly about his
Irish roots, his job as a shepherd of grieving families, and his
very Irish alcoholism.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that a funeral director, someone whose
entire livelihood revolves around carrying a mortal burden for people
heavy with grief, would be a generous and abiding poet. The two
occupations have their similarities, and funerals generally
incorporate poetry, one way or another. But just as it’s impossible
to have a death without a birth, you can’t have birth without a messy
bit of ecstatic ridiculousness.
Lynch wanders far from the graveyard. He’s a writer who’s made as
excitable by language as a man half his age: “Among the highest
and best uses of poetry, third only perhaps to the poxing of our
enemies and the commemoration of the dead, is the wooing, outright, of
our darlings.”
Thomas Lynch will receive the fifth
annual Denise Levertov
Award Tues April 22 at St. James Cathedral, 804 Ninth Ave, 622-3559, 8
pm, free. 