Bodies In Motion and At Rest

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.

Bodies in Motion and at Rest

Biographies & Memoirs

Thomas Lynch

Arts & Literature

Random House]

In February of 1970, Thomas Lynch, aged twenty-one, bought a one-way ticket to Ireland. He landed in the townland of Moveen, at the edge of the ocean in West Clare, outside the thatched cottage that his great-grandfather had left late in the nineteenth century with a one-way ticket to America. Tommy and Nora Lynch, Thomas Lynch's elderly, unmarried, distant cousins welcomed the young American 'home'. In the words of the author, 'it changed my life'. Booking Passage is part travelogue, part cultural study, part memoir and elegy, part guidebook for what Lynch calls 'fellow pilgrims' working their way through their own and the larger histories. It is a magnificent hymn of praise to Ireland.

Booking Passage: We Irish & Americans

Vintage Books USA

The poems in this volume are all concerned, one way or another, with achieving a balance in the face of gravity. Lynch looks for this equilibrium between equal and opposing forces, such as sex and death, and love and grief - all the things that make us mortal and memorable.

Grimalkin and Other Poems

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

JONATHAN CAPE.

In Still Life in Milford, Lynch casts the cold eye we are told to on life and death, history and memory, the local and the larger geographics. Examining the dynamics of faith, remembrance, and intimate conduct, these poems are informed by end times, tribulations and visions that make up the ordinary enterprise of daily life. Colloquy and narrative, soliloquy and tribute, Still Life in Milford engages the full register of the poet's voices as elegist, eulogist, obituarist, straight man and passer-by to achieve a difficult and inimitable harmony.

Still Life in Milford

Poetry

A decade's worth of poems by one of our most reliable witnesses, National Book Award finalist Thomas Lynch. In his fourth collection of poems, Thomas Lynch attends to flora, 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, fete and feint, Lynch's poems are powerful medicines, tonics for the long haul and home-going. from "Walking Papers"      You can think of it as punctuation      and maybe take some comfort from that, friend―      a question mark or exclamation point―      no matter, we're all sentenced to an end,      the movers and the shakers, bon vivants,      all ne'er-do-wells and nincompoops, savants,      sage and sluggard, deft and daft alike:      everyone's given their walking papers.

Walking Papers

The New Guard literary review is an annual journal founded in Knightville, Maine. TNG is the only independent multi-genre review in the state. We offer two contests that award $1,000 each and publication each year, one in fiction (The Machigonne Fiction Contest) and one in poetry (The Knightville Poetry Contest). Each year the judges change, and the editors change, with the exception of Shanna McNair, the founding editor and publisher. Our inaugural contests were judged by Donald Hall and Debra Spark, and our present contests (2011) will be judged by Charles Simic and David Plante. We have a letters section each issue, with contributors such as Maxine Kumin, Sven Birkirts, Thomas Lynch, Adam Braver, Scott Wolven and Tom Grimes. Our first letter section was entitled "Writers to Writers: Fan Letters to the Dead." We also have nonfiction contributors to each issue. Our 2010 nonfiction contributors were Bill Roorbach and Jaed Coffin. We are also a proud member of the Council of Literary Magazines &amp; Presses (CLMP).

The New Guard literary review

Bill Roorbach

2010 judges Donald Hall and Debra Spark

contributors include Maxine Kumin

Sven Birkirts

Jaed Coffin and Tom Grimes

Shanna McNair

The most obvious distinction of many south Louisiana graveyards is that hardly anyone is buried in them. In the delta, where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico, the land is flat, wet, and often below sea level, so coffins are placed in elevated tombs, vaults, and mausoleums. Truly cities of the dead, these cemeteries contain buildings of stone or brick, marble statues, wrought-iron fences, narrow passages, and hidden enclaves. In sixty-two photographs, William K. Greiner captures the visual landscape of these ghostly neighborhoods. A colorful respite from the gray conventions of graveyard photography, his images leap off the page with brilliant hues. His pictures are not just about the graves, but also about the lives and values of the people who inhabit and visit them. Where we expect to find solemn stones, Greiner points to a new lexicon of mourning. Plastic dolls, polyester ribbons, Styrofoam letters, and brilliant bouquets of plastic flowers adorn these graves and fill these photos. Holidays are marked with valentine hearts, Fourth of July displays, and Christmas decorations. Bingo boards and Harley-Davidson models stand as silent reminders of the daily lives the residents once lived.

The Reposed

Arts & Photography

Greiner, William K.

Individual Artists

Louisiana State Univ Pr

A Century of Service, A History of Healing THE BOYS TOWN STORY

Terry Hyland

Donning Publishers

THE BOYS TOWN STORY 100 Years

Boys Town

Our bodies all have stories to tell - and who better to tell them than fifteen of the world's finest writers? Buried beneath layers of flesh, our hearts pump, our lungs inflate, our kidneys filter. These organs, and others, are essential to our survival but remain largely unknown to us. In Beneath the Skin, fifteen writers each explore a different body part: Naomi Alderman unravels the intestines and our obsession with food; Thomas Lynch celebrates the womb as a miracle; AL Kennedy explores the nose's striking ability to conjure memories; and Philip Kerr traces the remarkable history of brain surgery.The human stomach, we discover, contains as many brain cells as a cat has in its head. The lungs weigh about the same as a loaf of bread. A traumatic memory can show itself on the skin. Moving, comical and often unexpected, this is an awe-inspiring voyage through the mysterious landscape of our bodies. Based on the BBC Radio 3 series 'A Body of Essays'.

Beneath The Skin

Science & Math

NAOMI ALDERMAN

PHILIP KERR

A.L. Kennedy

Ned Beauman

Chibundu Onuzo

William Fiennes

Daljit Nagra

Mark Ravenhill

Patrick McGuinness

Christina Patterson

Imtiaz Dharker

Abi Curtis

Kayo Chingonyi

Annie Freud

Biological Sciences

Wellcome Collection

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Books by Thomas Lynch