The Undertaking by Thomas Lynch

[Ben Mines]

 

Thomas Lynch is an undertaker in small-town Michigan who moonlights as a poet (or visa versa) and The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade is a book that yokes these two oddly compatible occupations together: a sometimes grim, often funny and endlessly fascinating lucubration on death, funerals and grief written with the care and lucidity that you would expect of a poet and the inside knowledge of one who has worked for over thirty years as a funeral director.

 

The human mortality rate holds steady at 100 per cent and, like it or not, this book was written for you. I recommend that you read it before it's too late.