Richard Tillinghast

Jan 3, 2025 | wonderlusttravel.com | Richard Tillinghast

Richard’s new book is called Night Train to Memphis, born out of a sense that life runs in big circles. Having, he says, been eager to shake the dust of Memphis from his feet as a young man, he found himself returning to it, literally and spiritually, now that he’s “old,” as he puts it..

Sep 27, 2024 | theamericanscholar.org | Richard Tillinghast

The Letters of Seamus Heaney selected and edited by Christopher Reid; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 848 pp., $45One St. Patrick’s Day in the early 1980s, I met Seamus Heaney for lunch at the Faculty Club at Harvard, where we were both teaching. The Boston area is one of the most proudly Irish places in America, and everybody was wearing green for the day. Everybody except Seamus Heaney, that is. Heaney was Irish to the core, but he had no patience for superficial symbolism.

Sep 3, 2024 | wonderlusttravel.com | Richard Tillinghast

Richard Tillinghast’s thirteenth book of poems, Blue If Only I Could Tell You, came out from White Pine Press in 2022. Richard lives on the Hamakua Coast in Hawaii. I read a lot of classical Chinese poetry in translation, and it seems to me that if a poet like Tu Fu were living in a remote part of Hawaii today instead of in China back in the 8th century AD, he might write a poem something like this one. I like my poems to evoke a place and then to suggest something less tangible between the lines.

Jul 27, 2024 | wonderlusttravel.com | Richard Tillinghast

Richard Tillinghast’s thirteenth book of poems, Blue If Only I Could Tell You, came out from White Pine Press in 2022. Richard lives on the Hamakua Coast in Hawaii. I read a lot of classical Chinese poetry in translation, and it seems to me that if a poet like Tu Fu were living in a remote part of Hawaii today instead of in China back in the 8th century AD, he might write a poem something like this one. I like my poems to evoke a place and then to suggest something less tangible between the lines.

Apr 12, 2024 | firstthings.com | Richard Tillinghast

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. —L. P. Hartley While drums pounded and cymbalsDrove men mad and bronze siege cannonPulverized walls built to last till the dayOf judgment, Fatih Mehmet—Shadow and Spirit of GodAmong men, Monarch of the Terrestrial Orb,Lord and Master of the Three Worlds—Commanded for music to be played in his tent,Had Herodotus read to him in Greek by candlelight,The poems of Rumī and Hafez recited in Persian.