“Walking Papers is a wonderful new collection from Thomas Lynch, one of the most humane and necessary poets working today. If Lynch was on Mastermind, his specialist subject would be the hard-won understanding that life teaches, rather than the textbook “wisdom” that so many other writers cull from books, and, at times, he is daringly barefaced in his ego-less celebration of the world he has come to accept, as in the concluding lines of this book, (from a fifteen line poem called Refusing At Fifty-Two To Write Sonnets):
The future, thus confined to its contingencies,
The present moment opens like a gift:
The balding month, the grey week, the blue morning,
The hour’s routine, the minute’s passing glance –
All seem like godsends now. And what to make of this?
At the end the word that comes to him is Thanks. “