Review by Booklist Review
The role of a funeral director is more than a vocation to Lynch; he considers it to be both an artistic endeavor and a human responsibility. Lynch expresses this calling as serving the living by caring for the dead. In this compelling collection of new and previously published pieces reaching back decades, Lynch explores death as it seizes people in different places and different ways. He includes the stories of family members, some who were on death's precipice and many whom he prepared for funerals. These candid, eloquent, and often humorous essays examine the funeral industry and signify in fresh ways the connection between the living and dying. Lynch also observes spiritual rituals of diverse cultures as they prepare the dead for mourning, and he shares insights into how faith comforts the grieving. Several essays highlight his many trips to Ireland in an effort to reclaim his heritage and family history. By delving both into his own life and society's norms, writer, poet, and small-town funeral director Lynch reminds us to accept the frailties of life and the mystery of death.--Elizabeth Joseph Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This meditative, often emotionally affecting collection from funeral director, poet, and essayist Lynch (Whence and Whither) explores, with personal honesty and philosophical curiosity, the intersection of faith, death, family, and vocation. It features selections from Lynch's four previous collections, along with five new pieces. It begins with "The Undertaking," an introduction to his trade that is moving and humorous in turns--the latter, particularly, as Lynch considers people's frequent discomfort with his profession, noting, "I am no more attracted to the dead than the dentist is to your bad gums." Despite this flippant remark, Lynch explores his work as a spiritual one. In "How We Come to Be the Ones We Are," he recalls how learning Catholicism's language and rituals in childhood informed his work. In "Y2Kat," one of the standout pieces, Lynch views his first marriage's collapse through the metaphor of the ancient, seemingly immortal family cat that hates him, again expertly straddling the line between comedy and tragedy. In the new essays, Lynch contemplates the potential collapse of his second marriage and the challenge of maintaining sobriety during dark days, among other topics. Providing an excellent entry point for newcomers to Lynch's work, this assemblage is an erudite but unpretentious discussion of life and mortality by a master craftsman of language. (Dec.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A funeral director and writer reflects on his life and profession."So I'm over at the Hortons' with my stretcher and minivan and my able apprenticebecause they found old George, the cemetery sexton, dead in his bed." This is vintage Lynch (Whence and Whither: On Lives and Living, 2019, etc.). A published poet of "internationally unheard of poems," the author is witty and wise, wry and humorous. If he gets a tad mawkish at times, so be it. He's been the only mortician in a small Michigan town for more than four decades, and he respects his profession and the people he buries and their kin. It's an honorable trade, and he's been writing engagingly about it for years. This collection contains 18 pieces from a few of his books as well as a handful of new essays. Lynch writes about embalming, cremating, and burying the old, young children, babies, a beloved cousin in Ireland, his father, two dogs, and the remains of a friend, which he scattered in a Scottish river. The author saw his first dead body with his undertaker father when he was a young boy. In his foreword, Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball writes that reading Lynch is "to suddenly be able to see what it's like to be comfortable with mortality. To respect it but not fear it. To see both the absurdity and beauty of death, sometimes simultaneously." In addition to chronicling his tasks as an undertaker, Lynch writes about his fluctuating faith, family, two wives, and friends in Ireland, where he often goes to live in an inherited cottage in West Clare. He shares his kooky business plan for a Golfatorium and his general disdain for Jessica Mitford's "muckraking" The American Way of Death. In one of his poems, he writes, "Like politics, all funerals are local."Thoughtfully crafted musings about life and death. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
