Walking Papers: Poems 1999-2009 Thomas Lynch 2010

A lovely and occasionally funny collection of poems about life and death.  Moving from his insights as an undertaker in a small town in Michigan to the local customs of Ireland, his family’s roots, Lunch manages to demystify death and place it in a perspective that gives it a proper role in life and living.  He also manages to direct barbs at Bush (an ass named George W), Cheney, Rice, and two attorney generals and their ruinous folly in Iraq and Guantanimo.  Walking Papers sums it all up and is brilliant!  “…..Listen—-/something’s going to get you in the end./The numbers are fairly convincing on this,/hovering, as they do, around a hundred percent. We die.  An more’s the pity./Same for the goose as for the gander, true/for both saints and sinners, fit and fat./We get our dose of days and after that/we get whatever is or isn’t next.” Also like the idea of Argyll, the sin eater in Ireland.