Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans

Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans PDF Author: Thomas Lynch
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393344312
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
"A good read even for those who have not the least ancestral or national bias—for those who desire civilized entertainment along with brilliant narrative." —Seattle Times In thirty-five years and dozens of return trips to Ireland, Thomas Lynch has found a template for the larger world inside the small one, the planet in the local parish. Part memoir, part cultural study, Booking Passage is a brilliant, often comedic guidebook for those "fellow travelers, fellow pilgrims" making their way through the complexities of their own lives and times.

Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans

Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans PDF Author: Thomas Lynch
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393344312
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 341

Get Book Here

Book Description
"A good read even for those who have not the least ancestral or national bias—for those who desire civilized entertainment along with brilliant narrative." —Seattle Times In thirty-five years and dozens of return trips to Ireland, Thomas Lynch has found a template for the larger world inside the small one, the planet in the local parish. Part memoir, part cultural study, Booking Passage is a brilliant, often comedic guidebook for those "fellow travelers, fellow pilgrims" making their way through the complexities of their own lives and times.

The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade

The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade PDF Author: Thomas Lynch
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393073408
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
A National Book Award Finalist "One of the most life-affirming books I have read in a long time…brims with humanity, irreverence, and invigorating candor." —Tom Vanderbilt "Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople." So opens this singular and wise testimony. Like all poets, inspired by death, Thomas Lynch is, unlike others, also hired to bury the dead or to 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 ear tuned to the indispensable vernaculars of love and grief. In these twelve pieces his is the voice of both witness and functionary. Here, Lynch, poet to the dying, names the hurts and whispers the condolences and shapes the questions posed by this familiar mystery. So here is homage to parents who have died and to children who shouldn't have. Here are golfers tripping over grave markers, gourmands and hypochondriacs, lovers and suicides. These are the lessons for life our mortality teaches us.

Walking Papers: Poems

Walking Papers: Poems PDF Author: Thomas Lynch
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393042081
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 95

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Book Description
A decade's worth of poems by one of our most reliable witnesses, National Book Award finalist Thomas Lynch. In his fourth collection of poems, Thomas Lynch attends to flora, fauna, and fellow pilgrims: dead poets and living masters, a former president and his factotums, a sin-eater and inseminator. Faux-bardic and mock-epic, deft at lament and lampoon, fete and feint, Lynch's poems are powerful medicines, tonics for the long haul and home-going. from "Walking Papers" You can think of it as punctuation and maybe take some comfort from that, friend— a question mark or exclamation point— no matter, we're all sentenced to an end, the movers and the shakers, bon vivants, all ne'er-do-wells and nincompoops, savants, sage and sluggard, deft and daft alike: everyone's given their walking papers.

The Sin-eater

The Sin-eater PDF Author: Thomas Lynch
Publisher: Paraclete Press (MA)
ISBN: 9781557258724
Category : American poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
His previous book won the American Book Award, National Book Award finalist and was made into an Emmy Award-winning Documentary. The Undertaking (ISBN: 9780393334876) Two dozen, twenty-four line poems.

The Depositions: New and Selected Essays on Being and Ceasing to Be

The Depositions: New and Selected Essays on Being and Ceasing to Be PDF Author: Thomas Lynch
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324003987
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
A wry and compassionate selection of essays reflecting on mortals and mortality, from the acclaimed author of The Undertaking. For nearly four decades, poet, essayist, and small-town funeral director Thomas Lynch has probed relations between the literary and mortuary arts. His life’s work with the dead and the bereaved has informed four previous collections of nonfiction, each exploring identity and humanity with Lynch’s signature blend of memoir, meditation, gallows humor, and poetic precision. The Depositions provides an essential selection from these masterful collections—essays on fatherhood, Irish heritage, funeral rites, and the perils of bodiless obsequies—as well as new essays in which the space between Lynch’s hyphenated identities—as an Irish American, undertaker-poet—is narrowed by the deaths of poets, the funerals of friends, the loss of neighbors, intimate estrangements, and the slow demise of a beloved dog. In “Gladstone,” from The Undertaking, Lynch reflects on his then twenty-five years as an undertaker at the Midwinter Conference for Michigan funeral directors, which incongruously takes place on an island in the Caribbean. With brutal, generous honesty, “The Way We Are,” from Bodies in Motion and at Rest, grapples with Lynch’s time as a single parent coming to terms with generations of his family inheritance of alcoholism and recovery. The press of the author’s own mortality animates the new essays, sharpening a curiosity about where we come from, where we go, and what it means. As Alan Ball writes in a penetrating foreword, Lynch’s work allows us “to see both the absurdity and the beauty of death, sometimes simultaneously.” With this landmark collection, he continues to illuminate not only how we die, but also how we live.

Wild Magic

Wild Magic PDF Author: Danu Forest
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide
ISBN: 0738763594
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
An Immersive Guide to Celtic Magic and the Wild Wisdom of Your Heart This book is a storehouse of magical and spiritual lore as well as practical knowledge based on age-old Celtic traditions. Filled with hands-on exercises and deep meditations, Wild Magic will show you how to access the Otherworld and come into a profound connection with the divine in nature. Author Danu Forest explores the timeless animistic practices of the Celtic faerie faith, creating relationships with the faerie folk, green kin, the ancestors, and the spirits of the land. You will learn to call on your spirit cousins for protection, and practice magical techniques based on the elements, such as fire scrying and spells to raise the wind. Discover the secrets of ley lines, dragon lines, faery roads, and spirit paths that will transform your life in the here and now. Work with Danu’s tips for wildcrafting and her unique recipes for making magical oils, salves, bundles, and ointments with common herbs. Drawn from authentic country wisdom and the folk traditions of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, the spells and rituals within are designed to channel your own modern wildness for the benefit of all.

Ireland's Great Famine in Irish-American History

Ireland's Great Famine in Irish-American History PDF Author: Mary Kelly
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442226080
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Ireland’s Great Famine in Irish-American History: Enshrining a Fateful Memory offers a new, concise interpretation of the history of the Irish in America. Author and distinguished professor Mary Kelly’s book is the first synthesized volume to track Ireland’s Great Famine within America’s immigrant history, and to consider the impact of the Famine on Irish ethnic identity between the mid-1800s and the end of the twentieth century. Moving beyond traditional emphases on Irish-American cornerstones such as church, party, and education, the book maps the Famine’s legacy over a century and a half of settlement and assimilation. This is the first attempt to contextualize a painful memory that has endured fitfully, and unquestionably, throughout Irish-American historical experience.

Whence and Whither

Whence and Whither PDF Author: Thomas Lynch
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
ISBN: 1611649102
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
From one of our most gifted writers and thinkers about death and the meaning of living comes a collection of writings about what comes next. Thomas Lynch, funeral director, poet, and author of the National Book Award finalist The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, has an uncanny knack for writing about death in ways that are never morbid, always thoughtful, often humorous, and quite moving. From his account of riding in the hearse at the funeral of poet laureate Seamus Heaney, to his recounting of the funeral for a young child in the 1800s, to his compelling essay about his own mortality, Lynch always finds ways to make sense of senseless things, as he ponders what will come next.

Tourism and Memories of Home

Tourism and Memories of Home PDF Author: Sabine Marschall
Publisher: Channel View Publications
ISBN: 1845416058
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Book Description
This book investigates ‘home’ and ‘homeland’ as destinations of touristic journeys and adds to recent scholarly interest in the intersection between tourism and migration. It covers the temporary visits and journeys in search of home and homelands by migrants, displaced people, exiles and diasporic communities in a wide range of different geographical and historical contexts. Personal and collective forms of memory are shown to play a key role in the motivation for, and experience of, such journeys. The volume contributes to the investigation of the tourism–memory nexus as it conceptualizes memory as underpinning touristic mobility, experience and performativity. Based on ethnographic case studies and other types of qualitative empirical research, the chapters of this book foreground individual touristic experiences, emotions, memories, perceptions, the search for identity and a sense of belonging. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of tourism, heritage, anthropology, identity studies, memory studies and migration/diaspora studies.

Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality

Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality PDF Author: Thomas Lynch
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393344290
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year Masterful essays that illuminate not only how we die but also how we live. Thomas Lynch, poet, funeral director, and author of the highly praised The Undertaking, winner of an American Book Award and finalist for the National Book Award, continues to examine the relations between the "literary and mortuary arts."