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Life
| 1948- [Thomas P. Lynch; b. Michigan; third generation of an Irish ancestor who left Moveen, Co. Clare, in 1890; mortician [undertaker]; returned to Ireland in 1970; issued Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans (Norton 2005, 296pp.; issued Walking Papers (Norton 2010), a fourth collection; noted for unvarnished accounts of the realities facing humans in their biological essence, and the prevalence of political folly in contemporary America from Bush to Trump; djunct professor in creative writing at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor; holder of awards from National Book Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Michigan Council for the Arts, and the Irish Arts Council. A frequent guest lecturer at universities across North America, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia. |
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Criticism
James Liddy, ‘Blood across the Atlantic’, review of Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans, in The Irish Times (10 Sept. 2005) [available online]; Sean O’Brien, ‘{A}n undertaker-poet who appreciates the value of plain speaking’, in The Guardian (18 Sept. 2010) [see extract].
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Thomas Lynch’s Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans - a memoir, travelogue, and social commentary - has at its core varying ruminations on the changes in Ireland since his coming here in 1970. [...] The memoir part is the chief delight of Booking Passage. Thomas Lynch, scion of a prolific family, on his father’s side hails from Moveen, Co Clare, up the peninsula outside Kilkee. In 1970 he made contact with his two remaining cousins there, Tommy and Nora Lynch. The author’s purpose and pride is contained in the line, “I was the first of my people to return”. He was royally welcomed, too, and given the run of the cottage, which he finally inherited; he maintained his cousin Nora’s struggle against the Land Commission and saw to it the 28 acres were effectively bequeathed as she wished. [...] The best writing in the book evolves from the sound of voices, from memory crammed into voice. A climax that serves as entrance to what might be called the Celtic world and this other world occurs in the addendum to the grace said by the author’s grandfather at festive Detroit dinners. Several pages repeat and declaim it until it blows Thomas Lynch to the lintel in Moveen west:
At this magical moment Lynch uses Cavafy’s Voices to ritualise the dead:
Lynch’s grandfather’s voice returns now “like distant music that dies off in the night” (the last line of Cavafy’s poem). Booking Passage is given vitality by a celestial nuance of auditory memory. To the above quotation can be joined the recollection of the sounds of that first cottage night: “They spoke in tongues entirely enamoured of voice and acoustic and turn of phrase, enriched by metaphor and the rhetoricals, and cadence, as if every utterance might be memorable, “Have nothing to do with a well of water in the night.” “A great life if you do not weaken.” [...] Thomas Lynch is not an original voice, but he catches what he is trying to say. His writing is strange or sublime only at moments. I wish this were not, as it seems, a book of articles composed for different outlets but a work devoted to the amazing survival of feeling between Irish-America and Ireland. Is emigration now a return to the conventions that bind blood and wanderlust, an extension of tribe-making? [...] |
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| Sean O’Brien, review of Walking Papers, by Thomas Lynch (Guardian, 18 Sept. 2010) | ||
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| available at The Guardian - online; see full-text copy as attached. |
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Poetry Foundation Notice (2025): ‘[...] By using his own daily routine as poetic fodder, Lynch has transformed the mundane task of preparing the dead into a life-affirming event. His lyrical, elegiac poems describe the dead citizens of Milford, Michigan, his own family relationships, and scenes and myths from his Irish Catholic upbringing. Sometimes described as a cross between Garrison Keillor and W.B. Yeats, Lynch’s work dissects the vicissitudes of the human experience with grace and wit. His first collection of poems, Skating with Heather Grace, is set in Michigan, Ireland, and Italy. Library Journal reviewer Rosaly DeMaios Roffman found that the poems “unpretentiously rehearse the dreams of the dying as they celebrate the everchanging relationships of the living.” Lynch, according to Roffman, crafts poems that weave symbolism and mythology into the human experience. His subsequent volumes of poetry likewise contain elements of his professional and personal life, mixed with ruminations about Irish culture and history.’ (Available online; accessed 15.12.2025.)
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Quotations
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| Quoted in Penguin notice on Walking Papers (2010) - online. |
| Poems at Poetry Foundation (publ. in Poetry between March 1982 and Feb. 2011) | |||
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| —Available at Poetry Foundation - online. | |||
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