Product Description

The facts of life and death remain the same. We live and die, we love and grieve, we breed and disappear. And between these existential gravities, we search for meaning, save our memories, leave a record for those who will remember us. 'So writes Thomas Lynch in Bodies in Motion and at Rest - the second collection of essays by the award-winning author of The Undertaking. As poet and funeral director, Lynch examines the relations between the literary and the mortuary arts - the connection between obsequies and prosodies; the effort to give voice to unspeakable things: great love, great heartbreak, great wonder, great pain; how icons, metaphors and ritualised speech are engaged in poems and in funerals. The essays assembled here explore a species at the intersection of millennia, beleaguered by choices and changes, encumbered by merger and acquisition, numbed by maths and technologies, in search of the meaning of Life and Time, our lives and times. In an age that seeks to define human experience in retail, high-tech or pop-psyche terms, these wise, exquisite essays explore the distance between birth and death, the condition of the human being and the state of ceasing to be.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #780014 in Books
• Published on: 2001-05-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Review
'There's nothing like the sight of a dead human being to assist the living in seperating the good days from the bad ones. Of this truth I have some experience'. Thomas Lynch, poet and undertaker, muses on his small-town American life. He is witty and unpretentious company. His accounts of his own heartbreaks and alcoholism are touchingly honest and held in check by the daily realities of his job, making 'Bodies in Motion and at Rest' more than a confessional and less cloying than Garrison Keillor. (Kirkus UK)

About the Author
Thomas Lynch is the author of three collections of essays, Bodies in Motion and at Rest, The Undertaking, which was shortlisted for the 1997 National Book Award, and Booking Passage. His poetry collections include Grimalkin & Other Poems and Still Life in Milford. He lives and works in Milford, Michigan, where he is the funeral director, and in West Clare where he keeps an ancestral cottage.

Customer Reviews

Poet and Undertaker muses on life, death, sorrow and joy.
I first heard Thomas Lynch on Radio 4 reading some of the essays from this book. Searingly honest, he muses on death, life, his family and his hate for the cat his son loves. It is moving, funny, lyrical, brutal and tender. Sometimes all at once! A book you can browse depending on your mood and need as each chapter is complete in itself. The photographs fronting each chapter are excellent too. A sombre but hopeful look at human experience. Buy it!

An Absolute Delight!
If this review can encourage you to buy Bodies in Motion and at Rest, by Thomas Lynch, I will consider my time has been well spent.

While I have your attention, perhaps I can also give a plug to his other beautiful book of essays, The Undertaking - Life Studies from the Dismal Trade.

I love Thomas Lynch's beautiful prose, it sings and rings in my mind.
His books are extremely thought provoking and the message is delivered in a style that is direct, honest, compassionate and humorous.

William Shakespeare said that "comparisons are odorous". Nevertheless, I hope Thomas will forgive me for saying that he seems like a cross between Garrison Keillor the folksy storyteller and Alistair Cooke the great radio commentator.

One reading was not enough, I will return to these books again and again.

Buy them! You won't be disappointed.

Essential thoughts on life and living
This book can't fail to move and engage you. His perfect sense of word use and word play leave you feeling that a great poet is reading aloud to you. His meditations and revelations on life and living always involve and amuse, whilst never losing their their ability to move you deeply. Simply essential reading.