THOMAS LYNCH is an undertaker in Michigan, which is one reason he has called his just published book of essays The Undertaking (Cape). However, it's not the only reason. "To undertake," he says in the preface, "is to bind oneself to the performance of a task, to pledge or promise to get it done." And he also declares that "undertakings are the things we do to vest the lives we lead against the cold, the meaningless, the void, the noisome blather and the blinding dark".
And so, though he may subtitle his book "Life Studies from the Dismal Trade", there's nothing dismal about the contents. Rather, these are arresting meditations on "the living and the living who have died," bolstered by all sorts of observations, reminiscences and musings, including a wise and witty consideration of our toilet practices and vivid evocations of times spent in Ireland (he has a second home in the Co Clare house from which his great grandfather emigrated). In short, this is the best written and most bracing collection of essays I've read in a long time. It's beautifully produced, too, and is a steal at £9.99 hardback.
I mention it here because the author (be/ow), who is also a poet of real distinction, will be reading from it at the Irish Writers Centre tomorrow night at 8pm. On the same platform will be the much admired Russian poet Olga Sedakova, whose new book,
The Wild Rose and Selected Poems, has just been published.
ASKED to select and read a poem at a funeral Mass last weekend, I thought the task would be easy. There were surely hundreds of fine poems suitable for such a sad occasion, and I was convinced that quite a few would be especially apt for the passing of Tom Lyng, teacher, historian, folklorist, co founder (with Hubert Butler and others) of the Kilkenny Archaelogical Society and closely associated with the Kilkenny Magazine in its first years when it was publishing early work by Heaney, Montague, Kinsella, McGahern and Banville.
But nothing was entirely appropriate. The famous lines from Goldsmith's The Deserted Village seemed an obvious choice for a man who had spent so much of his life teaching, but somehow they didn't quite capture his personality or spirit or suggest his extraordinarily wide range of interests.
A Robert Southey poem, The Scholar, fittingly and movingly caught his love of books, but not his love of people and community or the links which he constantly made between people and the places they came from and which led him to entitle his fascinatingly detailed and eclectic 1984 local history Castlecomer connections.
Interested in classical studies from his student days at UCD, he would have appreciated D.H. Lawrence's The Ship of Death. The little bronze ships placed in Etruscan tombs to take souls from this world to the next would have appealed to his sense of the importance of voyage, discovery and symbolism.
The fact that he was being buried beside his wife, Sheila, who had died just a few weeks earlier, led me to think about the great poems written by Thomas Hardy on the death of Emma Hardy - in particular The Voice, with its heartbreaking opening: "Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me."
In the event, though, it was another Hardy poem, the simple and affecting Weathers, that seemed just right for a man who loved nature, and who, like his friend Hubert Butler, believed in looking at life from the perspective of the parish. And, though chosen on instinct, it turned out to be apt in another way, too - I discovered afterwards that it was one of the poems his former students vividly recalled.
Overall, though, the task of trying to find lines to suit the occasion left me pondering that even the greatest poetry necessarily fails in these circumstances - no matter how intent it is on sharing insights and feelings that we all can recognise, and no matter how successful at doing so, it can never fully capture the awkward, irreducible individuality of anyone's life.
WE Irish like to travel, but to what destination? Well, Hodges Figgis in Dawson Street have done another of their occasional customer surveys and have discovered that Down Under is where we wish to be - the top selling travel guide so far this year is The Lonely Planet Guide to Australia.
After that comes The Rough Guide to the USA, followed by the Rough Guide to Paris, with another Paris guide book in fifth place. And South Africa figures in the top ten for the first time this year, with The Lonely Planet Guide to South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland at ninth place.
When we move from guide books to travel literature, our favourite writer is Bill Bryson, who features four times in the top ten (Made in America, Lost Continent, Neither Here Nor There and Notes From a Small Island) followed by Bruce Chatwin, who figures twice. No mention, alas, of Jan Morris's marvellous Among the Cities, a collection of fifty seven essays about cities throughout the world and one of my bedside books.