The Undertaking - Life Studies from the Dismal Trade

Funny, elegant and unbearably sad - A dignified little masterpiece by a man who understands the business of life and death. `Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople.' So opens the singular testimony of the American poet, Thomas Lynch. Like all poets, inspired by death, Lynch is, unlike others, also hired to bury the dead or cremate them and to tend to their families in a small Michigan town where he serves as the funeral director. In the conduct of these duties he has kept his eyes open, his ears tuned to t he indispensable vernaculars of love and grief...