For nearly four decades, poet, essayist, and small-town funeral director
Thomas Lynch has probed relations between the literary and mortuary
arts. His life's work with the dead and the bereaved has informed four
previous collections of nonfiction, each exploring identity and humanity
with Lynch's signature blend of memoir, meditation, gallows humor, and
poetic precision.
The Depositions provides an essential selection from these masterful
collections--essays on fatherhood, Irish heritage, funeral rites, and
the perils of bodiless obsequies--as well as new essays in which the
space between Lynch's hyphenated identities--as an Irish American,
undertaker-poet--is narrowed by the deaths of poets, the funerals of
friends, the loss of neighbors, intimate estrangements, and the slow
demise of a beloved dog.
In "Gladstone," from The Undertaking, Lynch reflects on his then
twenty-five years as an undertaker at the Midwinter Conference for
Michigan funeral directors, which incongruously takes place on an island
in the Caribbean. With brutal, generous honesty, "The Way We Are," from
Bodies in Motion and at Rest, grapples with Lynch's time as a single
parent coming to terms with generations of his family inheritance of
alcoholism and recovery. The press of the author's own mortality
animates the new essays, sharpening a curiosity about where we come
from, where we go, and what it means.
As Alan Ball writes in a penetrating foreword, Lynch's work allows us
"to see both the absurdity and the beauty of death, sometimes
simultaneously." With this landmark collection, he continues to
illuminate not only how we die, but also how we live.
