IT seems to be the definitive publicity gimmick - a new American poet whose day job as an undertake in Michigan makes him difficult to forget. Photographs of Thomas Lynch, plump, thinning hair neatly oiled, round specs, arms folded against a formal black suit and at times, jauntily posing beside a coffin in surroundings obviously belonging to a funeral home, appear to present a character, lugubrious enough, possibly even sufficiently weird, to be a member of the Addams family.
In real life, or at least in the life which exists off book jackets, he is almost disappointingly normal. Red haired and ruddy there is not a trace of the expected funereal pallor. And as he says himself, death is not all that scary; it is a fact of life, the one certainty." Philosophical he may be, yet he is also practical and believes ashes should be recycled.
Sitting in the audience at a reading during Galway's recent Cuirt International Festival of Literature, this undertaker son of an undertaker, could have been any typical American tourist, possibly a teacher on holiday. Certainly at ease, perhaps too happy to belong here, he is as shrewdly clear eyed as might be expected for someone who has been coming to Ireland for almost 30 years and knows the country better than many who have lived their entire lives here. Above all, he is an adaptable, calm individual, able to fit in and belong, while always retaining a valuable understanding of distance.
Dressed in fawn casuals, wearing a hat, Lynch's facial expression, as he stands in a Galway street, is open, interested and very alert. Verbally, be is more cautious, polite, almost Victorian in demeanour. He looks and seems far older than 48. This is a careful, observant, fatherly man who thinks before he speaks. For all his friendliness he does not waste words: is enthusiastic without gushing his approval. Wise and utterly unlike his fellow American mid westerner the folksy Garrison Keillor, he is a sophisticated observer. Lynch's responses are thoughtful, often witty, precise, always intelligent and direct, spiritual in a candid rather than cloying way. "I'm a poet, a funeral director, a father, a husband."
Unlike many poets, he makes no mystery of his art: "I like the sound of words in my mouth. I like the music. There are acoustic pleasures to the language. I like the idea that poetry raises language; it incites' and excites and inspires. With the essays, I'm trying to do something different. There is a polemical intent. I think the essays are trying to say we learn lessons about our living from the facts of our mortality. I guess I'm trying to help people look at something we don't like confronting. About four or five people will die in this county alone tonight."
Tending the small flowerbed outside his cottage in Moveen, Co Clare, where he stays regularly, he seems far more at home than he did in Galway city a few days earlier where he was identifiably a visitor. "It's great being here but I miss my wife. I'm glad I'm going home tomorrow." His daughter has arrived in Clare and will stay on. Chopin's music is filling the air. High over the magnificent countryside the sun is shining, over the newly washed greenness created by much needed overnight rain which has washed away the dust of a long drought. A few elderly dogs are playing like puppies. It is a good day. Work has been done on the modest, white washed cottage which was given to his great great grandfather as a wedding present during the 1850s. It was built, he thinks, "about 1840".
Lynch must be so used to death; does he look at people and find himself wondering what they will look like dead? It As a crude question but he laughs at it good humouredly. "No we don't really measure people up for death as the standard coffin is six foot six and so about 90 per cent of the population are going to fit," he says, before adding with characteristic thoughtfulness, "no, the aspect about death which most interests me is grief, how people react to it. The star of the show (the funeral) is not the dead body, it is the bereaved."
COMFORTABLE without being lavish, the house still fits in with the small farm dwellings of the neighbouring landscape. An unusual touch has been introduced however with a stone nameplate on the side of the house facing the lane. "Lynch, Moveen West" it declares. Another stone wallplate by the front door says, "Nora's". Although there are Irish connections on both sides of his family, Thomas Lynch, the second child in a family of nine, never had the Irish dimension forced upon him. "On the contrary, when I first said I was going to Ireland, my parents were a little worried I'd go native and maybe not come back." Neither of his parents was particularly interested in Ireland. Curiosity it seems, as well as his love of the poetry of Yeats, brought the young Tom Lynch to the west coast of Co Clare in February 1970.
Also at that time, his generation was faced with Vietnam but as he has noted, "I'd drawn high numbers, 254 in fact, in the Nixon lotto so I was free to leave school and go to Ireland. Free of the threat of being drafted, he was also confident that should he encounter difficulties, his parents would come to the rescue. His relatives, Tommy and Nora, the unmarried younger brother and sister who had stayed at home to mind their parents and work the farm, lived in the then thatched family cottage, Lynch's great grandfather - Nora's uncle had left behind when he went to America.
The flagstone floor remains. The kitchen area is efficient. The decor is minimal. Lynch makes tea and produces cakes and chocolate. A CD player shares the shelves with books mainly of Irish interest and a couple of tin whistles. But this is not tourist Ireland, Lynch the mortuary scientist is a working poet, who nevertheless sees poetry as an occasion. "It doesn't happen all the time; it is a part of life. Not life itself." Of being a poet in America, he says, "Poetry in the States is controlled by the universities and of course there is always the fact that once you mention poetry about 80 per cent of the reading public say `we don't want to know'. In Ireland people are interested in, poetry."
His interest goes beyond his own work. A photograph of Lynch taken with Seamus Heaney at Cuirt has been placed in a small frame. "I think that man is great, truly great. People here seem almost reluctant to acknowledge his stature; it's as if he is too close. In the next century, he will be the Yeats, the poet, the best of the lot. I think work like Seeing Things and that new one, The Spirit Level are wonderful. He's just Lynch looks out over the land and uses a word he seems to favour, "mighty". Two other poets attract high praise from Lynch, Carol Ann Duffy is also "mighty" as is Paula Meehan. Of Meehan he says, "she has a wisdom, an understanding about life."
At Cuirt, Thomas Lynch heard Heaney read for the first time in 15 years. "I had not seen him since I had first heard him at Michigan." Ironically it had been at Ann Arbour, where the late Joseph Brodsky who died on Yeats's death day in January 1996, had learnt his English. At Cuirt, Heaney had read Audenesque, an elegy commemorating Brodsky: "Joseph, yes, you know the beat./ Wystan Auden's metric feet/ Marched to it, `unstressed and stressed,/ Laying William Yeats to rest./Therefore, Joseph, on this day,/Yeats's anniversary, (Double crossed and death-marched date,/January twenty-eight), ... Worshipped language can't undo/Damage time has done to you:/ Even your peremptory trust/ In words alone here bites the dust. .. / Feed the dead./ So be their guest./ Do again what Auden said/ Good poets do: bite, break their bread."
The Brodsky lament impressed Lynch for many reasons, particularly because it shows a poet honouring a fellow artist through their shared art.
WHEN Lynch first saw the cottage, there were "two light sockets, a hot plate and open hearth and no plumbing. Water existed five fields down the land, bubbling up in a miracle of spring water, clear and cold and clean." Relieving himself outside proved a liberation for him. But there was also a practical reason; there was no toilet. One of the early changes Lynch initiated was the introduction of one as well as a shower. A modern bathroom and a septic tank followed. Soon after Tommy's death in 1971, Nora had decided to have the thatch roof slated. For Nora, Lynch became her family, while for him, she remains one of the most important people he has ever met. Ireland has featured in his work along with more personal explorations of feeling and loss. In The Moveen Notebook, a long poem dedicated to Nora Lynch, he presents his entire Irish family history in the form of a narrative address. The poem which appeared in the journal, Poetry Wales last winter, will be published in a new collection. "I wrote it not only to make a record of this story about a family but also to ensure that Nora would not be forgotten," he says.
It begins with his first arrival: "When I first came, the old dog barked me back./all fang and bristle and feigned attack./I stood frozen in the road. The taxi man,/ counting his crisp punt notes from Shannon said/ Go On by". That's your people now I went ... What kind of Yank comes in the dead of winter?"
Nora who "outlived the Land Commission/and most of those who'd tried to take her land" emerges as a heroic figure, determined to protect the family home. "She stayed./And her brother Tommy stayed and worked the land / the loyal if withered and spinsterly end/of the line until, as Nora said, I came.
At home in Michigan, Lynch lives in an ordinary house next door to the funeral home. Do his townfolk fear him? He laughs; it is as if I have accused him of being the Angel of Death, "No they know I'm there to serve them; they can call me any time. I'm accepted, I'm a former president of the chamber of commerce, I'm a Rotarian. At the coffee shop, I talk with the retirees, the bank managers, the conversation is about golf, taxes." While there is he conscious that there is this other life here in Ireland? The damp mornings in Michigan and the smell of burning leaves," very like the smell of burning turf" remind him of west Clare.
"From here my great grandfather stood and looked out/ over the heather and black thorn ditches/ upland to Newtown where the evening moved" wrote Lynch in an early poem, The West Window in Moveen.
There is nothing of either the returned Yank or the born again Irishman about him. Lynch does not suffer from a sense of cultural confusion. "I am an American," he says matter of factly, "born and raised." Yet he's aware of being able to draw on his Irish background as if it were another room to enter. "I think of my connection with Ireland as a gift, hard won by my ancestors, not by me. It was the facts of Irish history which brought my great grandfather to America. I'm trying to understand Ireland and the Irish, not as `the Orish thing' but ash people who live in Ireland with the same complex lives people have anywhere."
STANDING beside the whitethorn hedge, behind the cottage, he says, "I know this is the house my great grand father, Tom Lynch - Nora's uncle - left, I know this is the house my cousin Nora lived in for 90 years, it is important for me to know I can come to this house where she was born and where she died, was waked from." Nora died at 90 in 1992, six weeks after his 67 year old father's final heart attack.
Pointing out that most Americans are "something American, there always is some other country there in the background, so I am Irish American", Lynch knows what it is like to be constantly asked to explain the Irish situation. "Except that everyone over there, back home, thinks that the whole problem is all about Ireland and England; they have this romantic idea" - which leaves no room for the cultural complexities at the heart of the ongoing violence of Northern Ireland.
Lynch the poet made a strong critical impact on British reviewers with the collection, Grirnalkin and Other Poems (1994), powerful, eloquent, thoughtful poems which through logic, reason, intelligence and humanity attempt to find a balance between passion and pain. Echoing William Carlos Williams, that book includes some of the work from his first book, Skating with Heather Grace which had been published in the US in 1986, with new poems.
The selection was made by poet and editorial director Robin Robertson whose own tough, uncompromising first collection, A Painted Field was recently published. And it was Robertson who encouraged Lynch, having read some of his prose pieces which were later published in, the Irish literary journal, the London Review of Books, to work on a volume of essays. The result is The Undertaking - Life Studies from the Dismal Trade.
It is a superb book, extremely funny and blackly honest, essay writing at its best. I like most funeral directors, nurse a fantasy in which I am the last man on the face of the earth, having discharged my sad and profitable duties of burying everyone else, at which point I will be assumed into any available heaven with all my bills paid for the first time in my life." But Lynch also possesses the wisdom of a man who has seen pretty much everything, particularly death in its many guises. He prepared his father's body for burial and spent months hoping that although his mother was obviously dying of cancer before his eyes "everything was going to be all right". It was not until he was away in California on a reading tour in 1989 that he finally accepted his mother was dying: that "this was a sickness unto death. I spent those last three weeks with her and they were very important for me." He has buried children and suicides, has cleaned up the messes made by violent deaths, including having to paint the walls of a bedroom in which a distraught betrayed husband, weary of his wife's ongoing affair with her boss, had bled to death in bed by applying an electric carving knife to his throat. Death was eased by the whisky and Valium he had taken. Warm blood soaking the bed had woken the wife. The dead man looked "determined". A young rejected suitor, intent on leaving an indelible impression on the girl who got away, blew his brains out with a deer rifle and in doing so split his face into lop sided, ridiculous halves.
Home for Lynch is smalltown America a place called Milford in Michigan with a population of about 5,000 souls. It is the American mid west, traditional and conservative, "the conservatism of any small place. It has to do with people's connectedness and accountability to one another." Deaths have upset him but as he says "the death of parents is something we anticipate. It is the right order that parents die before their children - at the beginning of the century parents spent time burying children because of high infant mortality rates, now children bury their parents first."
Divorce affected him far worse. "It was more hurtful," he says, "I would have endured that marriage, yet you know, it wasn't until it happened, the divorce, that I realised I had until then just been living a life." Looking back on that time, he says, he had got married "because I wanted to be married". His first marriage lasted 12 years; he has written about it in his work, including the poem For the Ex-Wife on the Occasion of Her Birthday and stresses "I don't want to blame her. I feel upset for the hurt caused to the children. Also for divorces there is no funeral, no ceremonial leave taking." Using another quiet Irish colloquialism, he says "it was a bad match". For seven years, he cared for his four children as a single parent. Those seven years helped him mature, becoming in the process the worrier his father had been. "My mother was very easy; she felt God would look after everything in his own time. My father saw danger everywhere." Lynch married Mary Tata in 1991.
How many of his townspeople have died in the month he was away? The response is immediate. "Fighteen." How does he know this? Did someone phone him? "No, I call. This is a business, not a hobby."
