Walking Papers

Description

The most recent poetry collection from the author of The Undertaking, the celebrated and macabre Thomas Lynch. If life is pilgrimage, Walking Papers are the pages - the notes on the journey, news of the world, letters of introduction and dismissal - found in one's breast-pocket amongst one's effects. And Thomas Lynch, the celebrated poet-undertaker is our guide through a world that's painfully aware of its own mortality; as he says in the powerfully moving title poem- 'Listen - /something's going to get you in the end./The numbers are fairly convincing on this,/hovering, as they do, around a hundred/percent. We die. And more's the pity.' In this, his fourth collection of poems - his first in the new century - Lynch attends to the flora and fauna and fellow pilgrims- dead poets and living masters, a former president and his factotums, a sin-eater and inseminator. Faux-bardic and mock-epic, deft at lament and lampoon, accusation and dispensation, fete and feint, Lynch's poems are powerful medicines, tonics for the long haul and home-going.

Thomas Lynch's poems, essays and stories have appeared in The Atlantic and Granta, Harper's and the Times (of London, New York, Ireland and L.A.) and elsewhere. He has published four poetry collections and a collection of stories, Apparition & Other Late Fictions (published by Jonathan Cape), as well as works of non-fiction, including The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade. He lives in Milford, Michigan and in Moveen, West Clare.

An artist of great gifts, musically elevating and directing the speaking voice towards a startling power, moving through the accumulation of detail to give a visionary account of the ordinary life, doing justice to its terror and comedy. If it remains the poet's task to say things on behalf of everybody, Lynch shows how it should be done -- Sean O'Brien A poet of great gifts, a humorous visionary * Guardian * Like his admired Theodore Roethke, Lynch hails from Michigan - and like Roethke he can fashion long, singing lines unafraid of the old, elemental resonances of stars, roses, angels and the Latin mysteries of his Catholic childhood * Observer * Tragic, cryptic, compassionate and amusing, Lynch's poetry moves in a superb rhythm through the commonplace and the extraordinary * GQ * A fine and accomplished poet * Financial Times *