WHITE PINE PRESS
an independent literary publisher
Night Train to Memphis - Richard Tillinghast
$17.00 - ISBN 978-1-945680-79-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2024939688
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.
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The center of this collection is the “Night Train to Memphis” section, where the author’s hometown takes on almost mythic dimensions. One of the poems, “River Town,” makes an implicit comparison between this city on the Mississippi River and Cavafy’s Alexandria.
“‘All of us are in transit,’ says one line of this beautiful, luminous volume of new poems. Night Train to Memphis gives us new, powerful work, the artistry and sheer eloquence of a poet who, in his eighties, is writing the best poetry of his life—and the poetry of his youth and middle age remains as fine as anything we have. Yet Night Train is an advance on it all, a gift, profoundly pleasurable and wayfaring in the best ways, each poem like a ‘bird of astonishing colors,’ and somehow, reading through the separate journeys out, we are given a strangely consoling, happily renewing vision inward, even as that vision dares to face terrible realities:. This is a great book. I loved it and I will be trumpeting its virtues far and wide.”
—Richard Bausch, author of Peace and Living in the Weather of the World
“Characteristic of Richard Tillinghast’s genius, Night Train to Memphis gives us comfort with a beautiful strangeness. ‘Imagine what you know,’ said Shelley. Richard does just that. He welcomes us to a poem, treats us like kin, then quietly changes our lives for the better.”
—Roger Rosenblatt, author of Making Toast and A Steinway on the Beach
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“Richard Tillinghast’s poems remind us that, over the course of a life, one may be deprived of many things—like the stolen possessions in ‘To Whoever Broke into My Cabin’ or a loved city recalled from childhood. In Night Train to Memphis, melodies often redeem these losses—not surprising for poet who is also an accomplished musician. Tunes by Roy Acuff, Johnny Mercer, Ella Fitzgerald, and Phineas Newborn mingle with the strains of Beale St. and ‘gypsies playing jazz.’ And it is the music of poetry, in Tillinghast’s deft hands, that binds the whole. Now in his ninth decade, Tillinghast figures among the songwriters and wordsmiths of his Tennessee birthplace: ‘I was one of those, I still am, / closing the circle by keeping the circle open.’ His songs will edify and move you.”
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—David Yezzi, author of More Things in Heaven and Late Romance: Anthony Hecht—A Poet’s Life
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, The 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.