Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
July 2000

The Quick and the Dead

According to Thomas Lynch, we have funerals "not because it matters to the dead, but because it matters to the living." As author, poet, essayist, and possibly the most celebrated funeral director in America, Thomas Lynch should know. It is his job not only to care for the dead but also (and perhaps more dauntingly) to console and accompany the survivors, those who are left to grieve. His meditations on how we regard life and death have earned him a unique place in American letters. A finalist for the National Book Award for The Undertaking, Lynch now gives us Bodies in Motion and at Rest, a new exploration into what he calls the "literary and mortuary arts."

Hailed by The New York Times as "a cross between Garrison Keillor and William Butler Yeats," Lynch gives us glimpses of ordinary people and the ways they approach their own mortality. In stories about his close friends, and in discussions of sex and death, love and divorce, language and religion, commercial and spiritual consumerism, Lynch guides his readers effortlessly from the womb to the tomb with an inviting brand of wit and good humor, and with more than a few characteristic nods to the great poetry and literature of the ages.

Bodies in Motion and at Rest proves Thomas Lynch to be an essential author in a time when contemporary life encumbers us with constant reminders of change and choice, of millennial endings and beginnings. As it steers us through that existential midway between "Something and Nothingness," this indispensablebookoffers an artful and hopeful reflection on time and its treasures, on love and its power, and on birth, death, and, most importantly, what comes in between.

Los Angeles Times Book Review

[W]hat makes him such a fine essayist is that it's just the business of everyday life and death to him.

Richard Bernstein

Lynch engages the reader with a mixture of poetic and funerary elements....his voice is rich and generous. —New York Times

Jay Parini

Few readers will walk away from this volume less than stunned and grateful.

Nicholas Delbanco

A luminous work of words.

Booknews

A Michigan funeral director and award-winning author of (1997) continues his quirky observations on the relations between the literary and mortuary arts, the sacred and profane. E.g. his Biblical studies piece begins: "It is always a choice [in a hotel] between the soft-porn movies and the Gideon's Bible." Includes equally quirky illustrations. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Bernstein

[A] richly idiosyncratic new book of essays . . . As he comments on the big and the small things of life Mr. Lynch engages the reader with a mixture of poetic and funerary elements, of ephemera and durables both.
—The New York Times

Sherie Posesorski

The essays in Bodies in Motion and at Rest are a thought-provoking, engaging hybrid of memoir, meditation and comic monologue. Whether writing about his Roman Catholic boyhood, fatherhood, the family legacy of alcoholism, the funeral trade or the integral relationship in his life between the ''mortuary and literary arts,'' Lynch approaches his subjects with a beautifully executed balance of irreverence with reverence, gallows humor with emotional delicacy and no-nonsense immanence with lyrical transcendence.
—New York Times Book Review

Donna Seaman

Lynch, a poet, an essayist, and a funeral director, brings the incantatory beauty of poetry to his wryly philosophical and finely crafted prose in his second superb essay collection.
—Booklist