Richard Tillinghast is the author of three new books appearing in 2008: The New Life, poems, from Copper Beech; Finding Ireland, subtitled “A Poet’s Explorations of Irish Literature and Culture” from the University of Notre Dame Press; and Dirty August, a selection from the Turkish poet Edip Cansever, Talisman Editions. Of his 2000 book of poetry, Six Mile Mountain, Eavan Boland has written:

These powerful, deceptive poems appear to be about place. At first sight, they engage and enchant us with the eloquences and cadences of objects and distances: strange headstones, unfamiliar peat smoke and faraway drift fishing. But the force of this work is to make us wake from those enchantments to see that these are, in fact, not poems of place, but of displacement. It is the pain and waywardness of that displacement which makes these poems, finally, so compelling.

Damaged Grandeur, a critical memoir of the poet Robert Lowell, whom he studied with at Harvard in the mid-sixties, appeared in the University of Michigan Press’s Poets on Poetry series in 1995. Recently Tillinghast has been writing a book about Istanbul, a city he has been visiting since 1964. This book combines memoir, travel writing, commentary on architecture, religion, and Turkish cuisine amongst other subjects. For twenty years beginning in the 1980s Tillinghast reviewed new poetry for the New York Times Book Review. He has also reviewed books, done travel writing and written literary essays for the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and many other journals. A native of Memphis, Tennessee, and former member of the faculty at Harvard, Berkeley and the University of Michigan, he has been a regular visitor to Ireland for many years, and an Irish resident since 2005, he reviews frequently for The Irish Times and publishes poetry and essays in Irish Pages and the online journal, The Dublin Review of Books. more