A selection of the very best from one of America's most
thought-provoking writers: poems on life, faith, doubt, and death that
read like memoir, essay, and story. As The New York Times said,
"likely to resonate with many who have come face to face with life's
most important questions."
Thomas 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:
I have steady work, a circle of friends
and lunch on Thursdays with the Rotary.
I have a wife, unspeakably beautiful,
a daughter and three sons, a cat, a car,
good credit, taxes, and mortgage payments
and certain duties here. Notably,
when folks get horizontal, breathless, still:
life in Milford ends. They call. I send a car.
Thomas Lynch spent his career as an undertaker in Midwest America--and
in his off-hours became a writer of exceptional insight. Publishers
Weekly calls him, "A poet with something to say and something worth
listening to." This collection presents 140 of his greatest poems drawn
from his previous books, Skating with Heather Grace, Still Life
in Milford, Grimalkin, The Sin-Eater, and Walking
Papers. This is a collection for readers who love all life's questions
and mysteries--big and small.
"Thomas Lynch's poems take us under the apparent world to where
consciousness is alive and shimmering with joy and loss, blindness and
epiphany."--Billy Collins
