Selected Poems

Introduced by Dennis O'Driscoll, Selected Poems by Richard Tillinghast gathers the poet's own choice of some forty years of his work. "He is a wonderfully gifted poet, one of the few."-Louis Simpson "He is absolutely not the kind of poet who lays down the ideological law, peddles a party line, or instructs readers what to think. His humane work attests to a conviction that, in a world which 'is everything that is the case', diversities and disparities which seem beyond reconciliation or resolution are not beyond our imaginative reach or empathetic grasp.... More outward-looking and international-minded though he is than most contemporary American poets, Tillinghast nonetheless registers his country's history on his pulse.... In sinewy lines and solid stanzas-fruits of a lifetime's devotion to the craft-Tillinghast's most recent poems, undoubtedly his finest to date, fuse a sobering sense of mortality with the exhilaration of renewal, indeed rejuvenation, through love." -Dennis O'Driscoll, from the Introduction