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To see inside, was Tillinghast’s succinct response to the question, Why do you write? This short answer holds the key to his unstinting vitality, in poetry: curiosity, observation, and reflection.Night Train to Memphis addresses several recurring concerns. A sense of mortality runs throughout, including the title poem and the last poem in the book, “Canzona di Ringraziamento,” a “song of gratitude,” which is the title of one of the movements of Beethoven’s string quartet in A minor, opus 132. The poem concludes: “Give thanks / for this music that says no matter what, / we’re not done yet,” suggesting that though Tillinghast is intensely aware of his approaching mortality and is engaged in summing up and coming to terms with many of the events in his life,
Night Train to Memphis may very well not be the last we’ll hear from him. At an age when many of the writers of his generation have gone silent and are resting on their laurels, this poet is still active and vibrant, writing at the height of his powers.
“The Feast of the Hungry” addresses the poverty and homelessness that plague our society, seen from a historical, even mythical perspective. “When the Chinese Came to Our Village,” a dramatic monologue spoken by a Tibetan refugee, describes the callous take-over of her village by the Chinese Communists, whose egalitarian rhetoric thinly masks brutal conquest, exploitation, and a ruthless determination to destroy the native culture.
About the author
Richard Tillinghast’s latest book,
Blue If Only I Could Tell You, won the 2022 White Pine Press Poetry Prize.
Night Train to Memphis is his 14th poetry collection, in addition to five books of creative nonfiction. His poems have appeared in the
American Poetry Review,
The Atlantic,
The New Yorker,
Paris Review,
The New Republic,
Best American Poetry and elsewhere. He is recipient of the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship as well as grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Richard currently lives in Hawaii and spends his summers in Tennessee.
