Richard Tillinghast – författare

Richard Tillinghast, a celebrated American poet and critic, lived for a year in Ireland in the early 1990s and then returned each year until he became a resident in 2005. From an insider/outsider perspective, he writes vividly and evocatively about the land and people of his adopted home, its culture, its literature, and its long, complex history.Tillinghast orients the reader to Ireland as it is today. Following its entry into the European Union, Ireland changed radically from an impoverished, provincial, former British colony to a country where a farmer takes his wife on skiing holidays in Switzerland and is proud of his wine cellar, to one now home to immigrants from Europe, Africa, and Asia. For many Americans—Irish Americans in particular—Ireland is a mythic and timeless land; from his unique vantage point, Tillinghast debunks a good many stereotypes that prevent our seeing Ireland for what it was, as well as what it has become.Most of Finding Ireland is devoted to thoughtful readings of the works of Irish writers and playwrights, including W. B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Oscar Wilde, and Brian Friel, as well as lesser-known names that deserve a wider readership. Tillinghast also considers the significant contributions of Anglo-Irish authors—John Millington Synge, Elizabeth Bowen, George Moore, Violet Martin and Edith Somerville, William Trevor, and Derek Mahon—with excursions into Irish architecture, music, and garden design.In contemporary Ireland, Tillinghast finds a dynamic society that has stepped out of the shadows of its troubled past to embrace an inclusive, outward-looking interpretation of its history. Intimate in tone, entertaining, and always accessible, Finding Ireland captures an expatriate's enthusiasm for his new country and its evolving identity.

Six Mile Mountain is the seventh of Richard Tillinghast's twelve collections of poetry. The poems in this book, sometimes political in emphasis, sometimes sensual, sometimes elegiac, are rooted in the landscape of Ireland and America and explore love and betrayal, family, duty and grief, and the nature of personal identity. Tillinghast is adept with form, moving back and forth between free verse and metrical verse.

Six Mile Mountain is the seventh of Richard Tillinghast's twelve collections of poetry. The poems in this book, sometimes political in emphasis, sometimes sensual, sometimes elegiac, are rooted in the landscape of Ireland and America and explore love and betrayal, family, duty and grief, and the nature of personal identity. Tillinghast is adept with form, moving back and forth between free verse and metrical verse.

Renowned poet Richard Tillinghast’s wanderlust and restless spirit are nearly as well known as his verses. This book of essays captures that penchant to wander, yet Journeys into the Mind of the World is not merely a compilation of travel stories – it is a book of places. It explores these chosen locations – Ireland, England, India, the Middle East, Tennessee, Hawaii – in a deeper way than would be typical of travel literature, attempting to enter not just the world, but “the mind of the world” – the roots and history of places, their political and cultural history, spiritual, artistic, architectural, and ethnic dimensions.Behind each essay is the presence, curiosity, and intelligence of the author himself, who uses his experience of the places he visits as a way of bringing the reader into the equation. Tillinghast illuminates his travels with a brilliant eye, a friendly soul, and eclectic knowledge of a variety of disparate areas – Civil War history, Venetian architecture, Asian cultures, Irish music, and the ways of out-of-the-way people. This attention to history and cultural embeddedness lends unique perspectives to each essay.At the heart of his journeys are his deep roots in the South, tracing back to his hometown in Tennessee. The book explores not only Tillinghast’s childhood home in Memphis, but even the time before his birth when his mother lived in Paris. Readers will feel a sense of being everywhere at once, in a strange simultaneity, a time and place beyond any map or guidebook.

Starting with a wild taxi ride into town from Ataturk airport, Tillinghast takes his readers on a voyage of discovery through the storied city of Istanbul, known in Byzantine times as the 'Queen of Cities' and to the Ottoman Turks as the 'Abode of Felicity'. As comfortable talking about the distinctive and delicious Turkish cuisine as he is about Byzantine mosaics, dervish ceremonies, Iznik ceramics, Anatolian carpets, and the imperial mosques, Tillinghast illuminates Istanbul's great buildings with stories that bring Ottoman and Byzantine history to life and is adept at discovering both what the city remembers and what it chooses to forget. Easily overlooked mosaics in the church of Hagia Sophia yield stories of a Byzantine emperor who died playing polo while drunk and an empress with several husbands. From an obscure gravestone, the author brings to life the sacking of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade, when the Doge of Venice, though over ninety and practically blind, led the assault on the city.

Blue If Only I Could Tell You is the thirteenth collection of poetry by Richard Tillinghast. Long awaited, the book is his first since Wayfaring Stranger came out in 2012. Melodious, lyrical, these poems of place and displacement are deeply personal at times as they look back over a long and eventful life. Tillinghast also focuses on troubled and troubling aspects of the American story: the Indian Wars of the 19th century and the history of race relations in his native South, from slavery to the country’s current racial reckoning. It is rare to see a poet with such gifts for musicality, vivid imagery and finely honed diction address himself so pointedly to issues of social and political import.