Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality - Softcover

Lynch, Thomas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393321649 ISBN 13: 9780393321647

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001

Synopsis

Masterful essays that illuminate not only how we die but also how we live.

Thomas Lynch, poet, funeral director, and author of the highly praised The Undertaking, winner of an American Book Award and finalist for the National Book Award, continues to examine the relations between the "literary and mortuary arts." "Lynch engages the reader with a mixture of poetic and funerary elements....his voice is rich and generous."―Richard Bernstein, New York Times "[W]hat makes him such a fine essayist is that it's just the business of everyday life and death to him."―Los Angeles Times Book Review "Few readers will walk away from this volume less than stunned and grateful."―Jay Parini, author of Benjamin's Crossing "A luminous work of words."―Nicholas Delbanco, author of What Remains

About this title

Review:

All poets who take their jobs seriously spend a good deal of their time pondering death. Few, though, have logged as many hours as Thomas Lynch, who for 25 years has been a funeral director in Milford, Michigan. As might be expected from a writer who performs "daily stations with the local lately dead," Lynch's second essay collection, Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality, has a lot to say about both the current state of his industry (with its "Walmartized" funerals) and the attitude Americans have toward death, which is more or less to pretend it doesn't exist and to hope it never happens to us or anyone we know. Of course, this leads to our inability to properly understand life. And we become one of those stunned mumblers whom the author has spent a lifetime consoling and selling caskets to at Lynch & Sons.

As in his previous collection, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, Lynch muses on contemporary American life with an appealing mix of light and dark. The effect can be striking, especially in his essays on the death of a crafty old gravedigger; the alcoholism he inherited from his father and, devastatingly, watches develop in his son; his divorce and the wicked poem he later writes about his ex-wife. His prose is always lively, though in several essays he relies on the same cultural touchstones--Bill Gates, the Internet, his Catholic-school upbringing and the "wonderful breasts" of the nuns, and (oddly) the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song "Love the One You're With." More unfortunately, he can lapse into familiar generalizations of the "we boomers" or "as an Irish Catholic" variety. Then again, funeral directors must keep an eye on the habits and statistics of generations and groups (as Lynch puts it, "our favorite parlor game is Demographics and Expectancies"), so perhaps a few familiar generalities are excusable--an occupational hazard of the poet-essayist-mortician. In Lynch's case (and there probably isn't another), they seem a fair exchange for his entertaining and often surprisingly humble wisdom. --John Ponyicsanyi

About the Author:

Thomas Lynch has authored five collections of poetry, one of stories, and four books of essays. His first, The Undertaking, won the Heartland Prize for Non-Fiction and the American Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Granta, Harper’s Magazine, and the New York Times, among other publications. He works as a funeral director in Milford, Michigan, and teaches at the Bear River Writer’s Conference.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0393321649
• ISBN 13: 9780393321647
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 280