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Bone Rosary: New and Selected Poems
A selection of the very best from one of America’s most thought-provoking poems on life, faith, doubt, and death that read like memoir, essay, and story. As The New York Times said, “likely to resonate with many who have come face to face with life’s most important questions.”Thomas Lynch—like Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams—is a poet who writes about real things with language rooted in the everyday yet masterfully infused with I have steady work, a circle of friends and lunch on Thursdays with the Rotary. I have a wife, unspeakably beautiful, a daughter and three sons, a cat, a car, good credit, taxes, and mortgage payments and certain duties here. Notably, when folks get horizontal, breathless, life in Milford ends. They call. I send a car.Thomas Lynch spent his career as an undertaker in Midwest America—and in his off-hours became a writer of exceptional insight. Publishers Weekly calls him, “A poet with something to say and something worth listening to.” This collection presents 140 of his greatest poems drawn from his previous books, Skating with Heather Grace, Still Life in Milford, Grimalkin, The Sin-Eater, and Walking Papers. This is a collection for readers who love all life’s questions and mysteries—big and small.“Thomas Lynch’s poems take us under the apparent world to where consciousness is alive and shimmering with joy and loss, blindness and epiphany.”—Billy Collins
- GenresPoetry
244 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 6, 2021
6 people are currently reading
47 people want to read
About the author
Thomas Lynch
73 books162 followersThomas Lynch has authored five collections of poetry, one of stories, and four books of essays, including National Book Award Finalist The Undertaking. He works as a funeral director in Milford, Michigan, and teaches at the Bear River Writer’s Conference.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
September 11, 2023
One of my favorite poets and former professors once equated capturing ideas with the experience of catching fireflies before they escape into the night. There one minute, gone the next! Oftentimes, encountering other poets or lovers of the genre feels like a similar battle. (For those of you who have no trouble catching fireflies, I salute you!!) Thus, one of the greatest interactions of my summer occurred when I had the privilege of meeting the renowned Michigan poet, Thomas Lynch, at Mclean and Eakin.
Thomas, an engaging and generous man, felt like a personal reminder sent my way to never stop writing. Our conversation quickly revealed our shared connection with previously aforementioned poet, Robert Fanning!! We bonded over our mutual affinity for a man I have steadfastly referred to as my very own John Keating, for all the Dead Poet’s Society fans out there. After having what felt like life changing conversation, I immediately dove into his most recent work, Bone Rosary.
This collection, a combination of work from five previously published volumes and several dozen new poems, is a masterful and heartbreaking exploration into the meaning of life, death, and beyond. If you’re feeling a little lost, you’ll might just tear up during the introduction!!!!!!
Lynch, like his father before him, spent his life as an undertaker. This upbringing and profession forced him to face close and constant exposure to death. The loss of his daughter, Heather, his two divorces, his travels to his ancestral home in Ireland, and walks through Chicago are just a few aspects of Lynch’s life that decorate the pages and poems within this collection.
Through varied formatting, a masterful use of the English language, and the perfect touch of melancholy, Bone Rosary is a work that will nourish, comfort, and encourage readers’ to continually question the meaning of life. With a line like, “Deep in repose all poets mold the dark”, it would be a disservice to call this collection anything less than legendary. I can’t wait to read whatever this inspiring poet publishes next!
Thomas, an engaging and generous man, felt like a personal reminder sent my way to never stop writing. Our conversation quickly revealed our shared connection with previously aforementioned poet, Robert Fanning!! We bonded over our mutual affinity for a man I have steadfastly referred to as my very own John Keating, for all the Dead Poet’s Society fans out there. After having what felt like life changing conversation, I immediately dove into his most recent work, Bone Rosary.
This collection, a combination of work from five previously published volumes and several dozen new poems, is a masterful and heartbreaking exploration into the meaning of life, death, and beyond. If you’re feeling a little lost, you’ll might just tear up during the introduction!!!!!!
Lynch, like his father before him, spent his life as an undertaker. This upbringing and profession forced him to face close and constant exposure to death. The loss of his daughter, Heather, his two divorces, his travels to his ancestral home in Ireland, and walks through Chicago are just a few aspects of Lynch’s life that decorate the pages and poems within this collection.
Through varied formatting, a masterful use of the English language, and the perfect touch of melancholy, Bone Rosary is a work that will nourish, comfort, and encourage readers’ to continually question the meaning of life. With a line like, “Deep in repose all poets mold the dark”, it would be a disservice to call this collection anything less than legendary. I can’t wait to read whatever this inspiring poet publishes next!
May 22, 2021
I like this guy’s vibe.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 17, 2021
If you’ve never read a book by Thomas Lynch, you’re in for a treat. His latest, Bone Rosary New & Selected Poems is replete with “Lynchisms”. In his long career in the family business as a funeral director, Tom Lynch has been immersed in life and death in ways that most of us only glance at, if we dare. Lynch uses the totality of this life and death experience, coupled with his Irish Catholic background, to bring forth this latest work.
This is evident from the introductory opening essay, Beginning with Clouds of Witness, in which Lynch explains why he has a collection of soup bones on a rope, which he spontaneously and cleverly names his bone rosary. I only wish I knew more about Catholicism to appreciate more fully many of his references.
In the first section, poems from Skating with Heather Grace, there is much to relish.
In “Like My Father Waking Early” he says his father “would sit with his coffee and disasters.”
What an image those few words depict. The rest of the poem is Lynch’s baptism into the business of undertaking, ending with “crib deaths, and cancers, suicides/deaths in fires, death in cars run into trees/ and now I understand my father better.” Lynch has come full circle.
Once again, he puts to use his unique perspective on the human condition in The Widow, “At night she spread herself out like linen/for him to take feastly pleasures in/and liked it well enough, or said she did, day in/day out.” One can’t help but think about Lynch’s lifelong experience of laying people out when reading this poem.
But it’s not all doom and gloom when you read Tom Lynch. Indeed, you might very well find yourself laughing out loud, especially when you read For the Ex-Wife on the Occasion of Her Birthday. “The list is endless of those ills I pray do not befall you:/night sweats, occasional itching, PMS, fits, starts, tics, boils, bad vibes, vaginal odors/emotional upheavals or hormonal disorders…..” While the list isn’t endless, it fills two funny pages.
In the longest poem in the collection, The Moveen Notebook, Tom Lynch explores family history, identity and place, “we are still our fathers’ sons and daughters/still our mothers’ darling girls and boys/aging first, then aged, then ageless /We bury our dead and then become them.” And in the final stanza of the poem, “To bury the dead we must first unearth them/to see the bones still brittle in the dust”. Once again, Lynch’s uncommon familiarity with death penetrates.
And again, in his eight perfect lines about longing and grief, he evokes a vivid image in After Your Going, “There was a hollow after your going/as if the air …..sighed”.
When I read Local Heroes, my first thought was, “I wish I had read this poem on January 6, 2021, the day of the insurrection at the U. S. Capital. “Some days the worst that can happen happens/The sky falls or evil overwhelms or the world as we have come to know it turns/ toward the eventual apocalypse….. Still, this may not be the end at all/nor even the beginning of the end.” Tom Lynch has seen it all, and leaves one with a sense of hope, albeit fragile at times. of something greater than the worst day.
The last section of the book with new poems, Cloud of Witnesses, in the poem Nativity, opens with, “Some years the sky falls harder than others.” With these eight words, he sums up the past year and a half, in which we have faced the unspeakable losses of a pandemic and racial reckoning. And for Tom, he faced the personal and profound loss of his daughter Heather, “lost for keeps”.
Indeed, some years the sky falls harder than others. Reading this book, Bone Rosary: New and Selected Poems by Thomas Lynch softens the blow just a bit.
This is evident from the introductory opening essay, Beginning with Clouds of Witness, in which Lynch explains why he has a collection of soup bones on a rope, which he spontaneously and cleverly names his bone rosary. I only wish I knew more about Catholicism to appreciate more fully many of his references.
In the first section, poems from Skating with Heather Grace, there is much to relish.
In “Like My Father Waking Early” he says his father “would sit with his coffee and disasters.”
What an image those few words depict. The rest of the poem is Lynch’s baptism into the business of undertaking, ending with “crib deaths, and cancers, suicides/deaths in fires, death in cars run into trees/ and now I understand my father better.” Lynch has come full circle.
Once again, he puts to use his unique perspective on the human condition in The Widow, “At night she spread herself out like linen/for him to take feastly pleasures in/and liked it well enough, or said she did, day in/day out.” One can’t help but think about Lynch’s lifelong experience of laying people out when reading this poem.
But it’s not all doom and gloom when you read Tom Lynch. Indeed, you might very well find yourself laughing out loud, especially when you read For the Ex-Wife on the Occasion of Her Birthday. “The list is endless of those ills I pray do not befall you:/night sweats, occasional itching, PMS, fits, starts, tics, boils, bad vibes, vaginal odors/emotional upheavals or hormonal disorders…..” While the list isn’t endless, it fills two funny pages.
In the longest poem in the collection, The Moveen Notebook, Tom Lynch explores family history, identity and place, “we are still our fathers’ sons and daughters/still our mothers’ darling girls and boys/aging first, then aged, then ageless /We bury our dead and then become them.” And in the final stanza of the poem, “To bury the dead we must first unearth them/to see the bones still brittle in the dust”. Once again, Lynch’s uncommon familiarity with death penetrates.
And again, in his eight perfect lines about longing and grief, he evokes a vivid image in After Your Going, “There was a hollow after your going/as if the air …..sighed”.
When I read Local Heroes, my first thought was, “I wish I had read this poem on January 6, 2021, the day of the insurrection at the U. S. Capital. “Some days the worst that can happen happens/The sky falls or evil overwhelms or the world as we have come to know it turns/ toward the eventual apocalypse….. Still, this may not be the end at all/nor even the beginning of the end.” Tom Lynch has seen it all, and leaves one with a sense of hope, albeit fragile at times. of something greater than the worst day.
The last section of the book with new poems, Cloud of Witnesses, in the poem Nativity, opens with, “Some years the sky falls harder than others.” With these eight words, he sums up the past year and a half, in which we have faced the unspeakable losses of a pandemic and racial reckoning. And for Tom, he faced the personal and profound loss of his daughter Heather, “lost for keeps”.
Indeed, some years the sky falls harder than others. Reading this book, Bone Rosary: New and Selected Poems by Thomas Lynch softens the blow just a bit.
February 13, 2024
Himself
He’ll have been the last of his kind here then.
The flagstones, dry-stone walls, the slumping thatch,
out-offices and cow cabins, the patch
of haggard he sowed spuds and onions in—
all of it a century out of fashion—
all giving way to the quiet rising damp
of hush and vacancy once he is gone.
Those long contemplations at the fire, cats
curling at the door, the dog’s lame waltzing,
the kettle, the candle and the lamp—
all still, all quenched, all darkened—
the votives and rosaries and novenas,
the pope and Kennedy and Sacred Heart,
the bucket, the basket, the latch and lock,
the tractor that took him into town and back
for the pension cheque and messages and pub,
the chair, the bedstead and the chamber pot,
everything will amount to nothing much.
Everything will slowly disappear.
And some grandniece, a sister’s daughter’s daughter,
one blue August in ten or fifteen years
will marry well and will inherit it:
the cottage ruins, the brown abandoned land.
They’ll come to see it in a hired car.
The kindly Liverpudlian she’s wed,
in concert with a local auctioneer,
will post a sign to offer Site for Sale.
The acres that he labored in will merge
with a neighbor’s growing pasturage
and all the decades of him will begin to blur,
easing, as the far fields of his holding did,
up the hill, over the cliff, into the sea.
He’ll have been the last of his kind here then.
The flagstones, dry-stone walls, the slumping thatch,
out-offices and cow cabins, the patch
of haggard he sowed spuds and onions in—
all of it a century out of fashion—
all giving way to the quiet rising damp
of hush and vacancy once he is gone.
Those long contemplations at the fire, cats
curling at the door, the dog’s lame waltzing,
the kettle, the candle and the lamp—
all still, all quenched, all darkened—
the votives and rosaries and novenas,
the pope and Kennedy and Sacred Heart,
the bucket, the basket, the latch and lock,
the tractor that took him into town and back
for the pension cheque and messages and pub,
the chair, the bedstead and the chamber pot,
everything will amount to nothing much.
Everything will slowly disappear.
And some grandniece, a sister’s daughter’s daughter,
one blue August in ten or fifteen years
will marry well and will inherit it:
the cottage ruins, the brown abandoned land.
They’ll come to see it in a hired car.
The kindly Liverpudlian she’s wed,
in concert with a local auctioneer,
will post a sign to offer Site for Sale.
The acres that he labored in will merge
with a neighbor’s growing pasturage
and all the decades of him will begin to blur,
easing, as the far fields of his holding did,
up the hill, over the cliff, into the sea.
May 31, 2025
I'm a sad man with a thin heart dying
from complications of a complex race of men
who all their lives look for holes to fill
with all their lives. Their lives and loss of will.
-- "Learning Gravity"
There was a comfort in those great gulls, how they bent
against their fatal gravity -- at the last
moment turning up with fish, effortless
in their ascension, full of hope, they seemed
a new life-form light-years removed from me.
-- "I Felt Myself Turning"
Where else but in our public library
can we indulge our curiosities,
imagination dancing in the round,
as one notion chases after others?
To be among these elegant voices
can get you going off in all directions
and get you back somehow from whence you came.
-- "To Be Among These Elegant Voices"
Some days he felt so happily haunted,
by loving ghosts and gods upholding him.
Some days he felt entirely alone.
-- "He Considers Not the Lilies but Their Excellencies"
love's wanting wound
-- "Benediction"
from complications of a complex race of men
who all their lives look for holes to fill
with all their lives. Their lives and loss of will.
-- "Learning Gravity"
There was a comfort in those great gulls, how they bent
against their fatal gravity -- at the last
moment turning up with fish, effortless
in their ascension, full of hope, they seemed
a new life-form light-years removed from me.
-- "I Felt Myself Turning"
Where else but in our public library
can we indulge our curiosities,
imagination dancing in the round,
as one notion chases after others?
To be among these elegant voices
can get you going off in all directions
and get you back somehow from whence you came.
-- "To Be Among These Elegant Voices"
Some days he felt so happily haunted,
by loving ghosts and gods upholding him.
Some days he felt entirely alone.
-- "He Considers Not the Lilies but Their Excellencies"
love's wanting wound
-- "Benediction"
July 20, 2024
Pressing the linens for Thanksgiving, she
recalls the bright dress she married in—
tight lace and organdy; how after ironing
she held it to herself, arm over arm,
like a thin partner in a dance and danced
in slow approving turns around the room
like the morning of her first communion:
ready as she’s been for anything, ever—
for the first time with him, the mix of sweat
and sweet breath, fond percussion, how she pressed
beneath the low communion of their lovemaking.
It seemed to her than like the care of linens
or the care of children, or in spring,
like pressing new seeds into her garden
or the meal she spreads out for Thanksgiving:
a portion chore, a portion sacrament.
Thomas Lynch, The Liturgist
recalls the bright dress she married in—
tight lace and organdy; how after ironing
she held it to herself, arm over arm,
like a thin partner in a dance and danced
in slow approving turns around the room
like the morning of her first communion:
ready as she’s been for anything, ever—
for the first time with him, the mix of sweat
and sweet breath, fond percussion, how she pressed
beneath the low communion of their lovemaking.
It seemed to her than like the care of linens
or the care of children, or in spring,
like pressing new seeds into her garden
or the meal she spreads out for Thanksgiving:
a portion chore, a portion sacrament.
Thomas Lynch, The Liturgist
February 13, 2021
I was lucky enough to read this book in manuscript so I could blurb it. It is a glorious collection from a life's work! Here's my blurb:
One poem, near the middle of this rich collection from a life’s work, tells us “All … come to their ashen ends and life goes on.” Because of his occupation (funeral director), Thomas Lynch has looked longer and harder into those “ashen ends” than most of us. But his art (these poems) sings the glory and the pain of the lives that go on. Lynch has found a diction and a rhythm, both Irish and Midwestern, that prays and grieves, thinks and rages against the power of indifference. There is no other voice quite like this one.
One poem, near the middle of this rich collection from a life’s work, tells us “All … come to their ashen ends and life goes on.” Because of his occupation (funeral director), Thomas Lynch has looked longer and harder into those “ashen ends” than most of us. But his art (these poems) sings the glory and the pain of the lives that go on. Lynch has found a diction and a rhythm, both Irish and Midwestern, that prays and grieves, thinks and rages against the power of indifference. There is no other voice quite like this one.
January 23, 2023
I enjoyed his older poems. His new stuff was a bit too biblical and Catholic for me.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews