Two American poets who share a wry, dark humour:
Thomas Lynch, hailed by The New York Times as a cross between Garrison Keillor and William Butler Yeats, gives us glimpses of ordinary people and the ways they approach their own mortality. He lives in Milford, Michigan where he has been the funeral director since 1974, and in Moveen, Co. Clare, Ireland where he keeps an ancestral cottage.
Tony Hoagland’s poems poke and provoke at the same time as they entertain and delight. He is American poetry’s hilarious ‘high priest of irony’, a wisecracker and a risk-taker whose disarming humour, self-scathing and tenderness are all fuelled by an aggressive moral intelligence. He pushes the poem not just to its limits but over the edge.
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