When roused to anger he can be pretty powerful. Lynch's poetry usually operates at the end of the spectrum where metaphor is less prominent than the possibilities of an apparent plain-spokenness. The elegiac elements of Walking Papers are interleaved with some striking public poems on the Iraq war and the problems of ensuring good government. The poem's tone is agnostic, but the turn of wit suggests that this may have been, as they say, a good death, theologically speaking. There are moments when Lynch seems sentimental that this is not quite one of them owes much to the placing of that metaphysical pun, "level", which pairs the priest's humane calm and his posture in death.
There is plenty of evidence that the world of the ancestrally Irish Lynch is Roman Catholic – as witness the conversational leavetaking in "Fr Andrews", addressed to the parish priest he has just seen buried: "we see you now, our level man, / out of the morning's worship into the sun, / the coach at the kerb, and on your way again". That is, of course, part of the mortician's procedure, while also sounding like the mixture of threat and insult emanating from Dante's underworld.
"Libretti di Gianni Gibellini" is – unusually, I think – a poem of praise to the undertaker who oversaw the obsequies of Pavarotti and advised a disapproving local priest to "keep his mouth sewn shut". In Walking Papers, his first collection for 10 years, death is not Lynch's only subject, but it inevitably provides what Empson called "an improving border" to all his work. This is good advice, as many readers have acknowledged before going on to ignore it completely. In his poem "Ignorance of Death", William Empson described death as "the trigger of the literary man's biggest gun", but suggested that our ignorance makes the subject "one that most people should be blank upon". Probably.Īs well as providing a rich supply of tension-relieving jokes, Lynch's life as an undertaker has enabled him to deal with mortality in its true place of residence, at the centre of things, at times with the hope of humanising this definitive process. Lynch also has a campaigning side: a recent essay in the Huffington Post saw him urging Congress to pass a bill protecting the dead from exploitation by "big box" death insurers, who take the money ("pay now, die later") but neglect to provide graves for the deceased. His activities are so well integrated that listed among his forthcoming readings is an appearance at the Connecticut Funeral Directors Association annual convention. Thus as a man originally became a gentleman, or a king, by force of valour, the cane in its evolution has ever been the symbol of a superior caste.T homas Lynch (born in 1948) is an unusual poet in that he has been able to unite theory and practice: not only does he write the elegies, but he is the local undertaker in his home town of Milford, Michigan. And, down the long vista of the past, the cane, in its various manifestations, has ever been the mark of strength, and so of dignity. The spear, the stave, the pilgrim's staff, the sword, the sceptre-always has the cane-carrying animal borne something in his hand. The cane, so to speak, with which primitive man wooed his bride, defended his life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, and brought down his food, was (like all canes which are in good taste) admirably chosen for the occasion. The prehistoric ape, we are justified in assuming, struggled upright upon a cane. Perhaps nothing can more subtly convey the psychology of a man than his feeling about a cane. And nothing that would readily occur to mind would more eloquently express a civilisation than its evident attitude toward canes. Indeed, a very fair account of mankind might be made by writing the story, of its canes. Canes are carried in all parts of the world, and have been carried-or that which was the forefather of them has been carried-since human history began. Some people, without doubt, are born with a deep instinct for carrying a cane some consciously acquire the habit of carrying a cane and some find themselves in a position where the matter of carrying a cane is thrust upon them.
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