Poet Thomas Lynch takes on the passing of time and friends

Michigan Public | By Mercedes Mejia

Published April 20, 2015 at 9:44 AM EDT

Thomas Lynch lives in Milford, Michigan where he has been the funeral director since 1974, and in Moveen, Co. Clare, Ireland where he keeps an ancestral cottage.

As part of our series "Poetically Speaking" we're highlighting Michigan poets.

Thomas Lynch is the author of five collections of poems and four books of essays. His essays, poems and stories have appeared in The Atlantic and Granta, The New York Times and Times of London, The New Yorker, Poetry and The Paris Review and elsewhere.

“Here's an older poem, written years ago, to honor the old guys I've had coffee with most mornings for the past 30 years. The two guys mentioned in the poem's text, Bert and Murray, are both now dead and gone, but the breakfast blather goes on and on, as it does, with or without us.”

Thomas Lynch reading his poem Euclid.

From WALKING PAPERS, Poems, Thomas Lynch, W.W. Norton & Co. 2010

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