Walking Papers

If life is pilgrimage, Walking Papers are the pages - the notes on the journey, news of the world, letters of introduction and dismissal - found in one''s breast-pocket amongst one''s effects. And Thomas Lynch, the celebrated poet-undertaker is our guide through a world that''s painfully aware of its own mortality; as he says in the powerfully moving title poem: ''Listen - /something''s going to get you in the end./The numbers are fairly convincing on this,/hovering, as they do, around a hundred/percent. We die. And more''s the pity.''

In this, his fourth collection of poems - his first in the new century - Lynch attends to the flora and 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, accusation and dispensation, fete and feint, Lynch''s poems are powerful medicines, tonics for the long haul and home-going.