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Night Train to Memphis, Richard Tillinghast’s fourteenth book of poetry, represents the culmination of a long writing career and a return to the author’s roots. As the title poem asserts, “Every trip home is a pilgrimage into the self.” This book takes us on a multifaceted pilgrimage. The poems represent not only a voyage of self-discovery, they also offer incisive explorations of the world in which we live: the plight of America’s unhoused, who live “along the garbage-strewn freeway / in their tents and lean-tos,” Tibetan farmers, whose land has been brutally invaded by Chinese soldiers. An awareness of mortality pervades the entire volume. “All of us are in transit,” one poem says: ourselves, “the river, the moon, / then the mortal stars.”Richard Tillinghast has written many books of poetry, along with literary travel books on Istanbul and Ireland and a critical biography of the poet Robert Lowell, with whom he studied writing at Harvard. Tillinghast has received a number of awards and honors, including grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Amy Lowell Trust, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His work has been published in The New Yorker, Paris Review, the Atlantic, Best American Poetry and elsewhere. A native of Memphis who has traveled widely and lived abroad, including six years in Ireland, Richard now makes his home on Hawaii’s Big Island and spends his summers in Tennessee.
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