Thomas Lynch presumably sees himself as primarily a poet, but it was a book of essays entitled "The Undertakings" which earned him a prestigious literary award a few years back. He is Irish-American, a fact which could be safely deduced from his name even if we weren't told it fairly frequently, and by profession (the business of writing apart, of course) an undertaker. Hence the title of his first book, and it is also an element in the present one, both in its title and its content. Lynch lives and works in Milford, Michigan, but also keeps a cottage in West Clare, from where his paternal grandfather emigrated near the end of the 19th century.
The essay as a literary form appears to be coming back, in fact it is back already; and Lynch's approach is notably free-ranging and non-academic. There is not, in fact, a single footnote in the entire book, though there are occasional quotations - from his own poetry, from Auden and Yeats and Seamus Heaney, and even from Ted Hughes. He carries his emotions, if not precisely on his sleeve, at least readily within arm's length and the tone at times is acutely personal without verging at all on literary exhibitionism. Lynch, above all, is concerned with the eternal basics of living and dying. Being an undertaker, after all, brings a man into first-hand contact with both, and Lynch grew up in the profession and learned it from his father.
The world of the Catholic Irish-American seems to be very family-oriented, sometimes almost claustrophobically so, and its morality tended until very recently to be traditional black and white. It is not a "cool" culture, either; in fact it is highly emotional and even emotionalistic, though in general it respects education and enterprise. Lynch in his own, very contemporary and rather freelance way, is a believing Catholic, one of a generation which in childhood was taught by nuns who "sold pagan babies for five dollars a copy". (It brought back to me misty childhood memories of the "black babies" propaganda once inculcated in Irish convents and primary schools).
Religion Lynch finds to be an ambivalent heredity. As he puts it, "life seems a pursuit of communication and atonement. To be at one with God and at peace with our neighbours. So much about religion puts us at odds. But at the same time it gives us the gift of language. Faith and fear share the same vocabulary; hope and despair the same metaphors; love and mistrust trade well-known idioms. I am given a voice by a church that is shaped by famine in Ireland, schism in Byzantium, encyclicals from Rome, crusades to the east, missions to the west. And I have been, as a Catholic, variously devout, lukewarm, outraged and indifferent, ashamed, lazy, zealous and amazed. I have been, like the Church, imperfect, inconsistent, mean-spirited, cruel and loving and loved."
And of his own profession: "I bury the dead. I dress them and put them in caskets and take them to church. The colloquies of love and grief, life and death, suffering and salvation, in my work achieve a kind of harmony, a kind of silence."
Lynch has had his own share of both love and grief. The son from his first marriage - he has been married twice - began from the premature age of 14 to display signs of incipient alcoholism. It had been a family legacy, since there were various boozy ancestors and Lynch's own father had learned to drink hard as a US marine in the second World War - though he rallied to beat the habit and remained on the dry until his death 25 years later. (As a compensation, his family buried him with a bottle of whiskey under each elbow). Lynch, in turn, drank fairly heavily in youth and during his early years of marriage, but later he learned to handle it, within reason.
His son, however, was a lost soul almost from the first, and by his third year in high school the writing was there on the wall, in capital letters. At times he rallied a little, but in the end he was a hopeless drop-out, though still loving and apologetic towards his family almost to the last. His father had the grim task of putting him in his coffin - or casket. Another son, taught by his father to fish at a tender age, grew so good at it that now the roles are reversed: "He rows me down the river, through the deep holes and gravel runs, and shows me what to cast and where to cast it." And what's more, this son has since made a living out of fishing and has his own boat, his own clientele and hard-won expertise.
Irish-Americans apart, there were also relatives back in Ireland whom he had never met, nor had his father met them, though they were the son and daughter of his brother. At Sunday dinners in his grandfather's house, where Grace was recited over the turkey and gravy, his grandfather would add: "And don't forget your cousins, Tommy and Norah Lynch on the banks of the River Shannon." Eventually he tracked them down in Kilkee, though Tommy died the year after Lynch met him (1970).
By contrast Norah, who "changed my life", lived on until 1992, when she was almost 90. He kept going back to see her in Clare year after year, and after her brother died she obtained a visa and went to see the country where her siblings and cousins had gone for good. In the end she made five trips to the US and when she died, she left her cottage to him. He still goes for sojourns there twice a year, and he also gets The Irish Times and the Clare Champion regularly in the mail.
Not all the essays are so autobiographical or semi-autobiographical, though there is a long and charmingly tragi-comic (though rather too whimsical) domestic saga about his son's cat, which the son loved and the father (justifiably, it seems ) detested. Others deal with the realities of abortion, an issue on which Lynch sees both sides with clarity and charity; the youthful miseries and ecstasies of sexual discovery; with his start as a poet; with certain fellow-writers such as the Irish poet Matthew Sweeney, who lives in London; with poetry seminars and conferences and the life of a professional writer.
Certain of the pieces seem slightly slick and rather insubstantial, in the style of radio talks or occasional journalism, but Lynch is never content to be just another Garrison Keillor. Throughout, the book reveals a vibrant, positive and on the whole likeable personality, at once tough and vulnerable, extrovert and introspective. The occasional self-quotations, too, suggest that his poetry would be well worth getting to know better.
Brian Fallon is an author and critic