Walking Papers
  • Published: 15 August 2010
  • ISBN: 9780224090063
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 80
  • RRP: $29.99

Walking Papers

Formats & editions
EBook
30 Jun 2011
Tr. Paperback
15 Aug 2010
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The most recent poetry collection from the author of The Undertaking, the celebrated and macabre Thomas Lynch.

If life is pilgrimage, Walking Papers are the pages - the notes on the journey, news of the world, letters of introduction and dismissal - found in one's breast-pocket amongst one's effects. And Thomas Lynch, the celebrated poet-undertaker is our guide through a world that's painfully aware of its own mortality; as he says in the powerfully moving title poem: '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. And more's the pity.'

In this, his fourth collection of poems - his first in the new century - Lynch attends to the flora and fauna and fellow pilgrims: dead poets and living masters, a former president and his factotums, a sin-eater and inseminator. Faux-bardic and mock-epic, deft at lament and lampoon, accusation and dispensation, fete and feint, Lynch's poems are powerful medicines, tonics for the long haul and home-going.
  • Published: 15 August 2010
  • ISBN: 9780224090063
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 80
  • RRP: $29.99
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About the author

Thomas Lynch

Thomas Lynch is the award winning author of three collections of poems and three books of nonfiction, including The Undertaking - Life Studies from the Dismal Trade. His work has appeared in the Atlantic and New Yorker, Harper's, Granta, and Paris Review. His commentaries have appeared in the New York Times, the Irish Times and The Times and are regularly broadcast on the BBC, RTE and NPR. He lives in Milford, Michigan, and Moveen, West Clare.

Also by Thomas Lynch

Apparition & Late Fictions
Booking Passage
Bodies In Motion and At Rest
Still Life In Milford
The Undertaking
Grimalkin And Other Poems
See all

Praise for Walking Papers

An artist of great gifts, musically elevating and directing the speaking voice towards a startling power, moving through the accumulation of detail to give a visionary account of the ordinary life, doing justice to its terror and comedy. If it remains the poet's task to say things on behalf of everybody, Lynch shows how it should be done

Sean O'Brien

A fine and accomplished poet

Financial Times

Tragic, cryptic, compassionate and amusing, Lynch's poetry moves in a superb rhythm through the commonplace and the extraordinary

GQ

Like his admired Theodore Roethke, Lynch hails from Michigan - and like Roethke he can fashion long, singing lines unafraid of the old, elemental resonances of stars, roses, angels and the Latin mysteries of his Catholic childhood

Observer

A poet of great gifts, a humorous visionary

Guardian

When roused to anger he can be pretty powerful

Saturday Guardian
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