Bone Rosary
Giddy with reverence for a master, this page is honored to call attention to this best-of collection—featuring 140 poems from Thomas Lynch’s five previous books, along with forty-three new works. A former undertaker taken to stringing animal bones into long strands of garland—bone rosaries—in hopes of scaring off would be intruders, Lynch lives alone with a dog on a remote northern Michigan lake and occasionally delivers spoken-word pieces for BBC radio.
A DREAM OF DEATH IN THE FIRST PERSON
I’m coming the coast road into Moveen.
This part replays itself, over and over
to a standstill, until I’m hardly moving.
Out in the ocean are islands I’ve never
noticed in pictures I have of that place.
I take this as a signal I’m dreaming.
Within the dream, then, I begin to bless
myself against such peril as these dreams
in all their early versions put me in.
In one, great soaring gulls keep coaxing me,
by angles of their flight I understand,
to join them in the air beyond the land
and make my life with them diving between islands.
Reviewed by
Matt Sutherland
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