Richard Tillinghast, Six Mile Mountain

Reviewed by Michael Graber

Publisher: Story Line Press,
ISBN:I-885266-90-1
$13.95.


Home of the Blues and Elvis, Fed Ex and Holiday Inn, Memphis has never been considered a literary hotbed. Even educated readers have a hard time naming a handful of world-class, locally born or based writers or poets. Given such a sparse playing field and judging by his credentials (seven published books of poetry, a critical work on Robert Lowell, and pieces scattered in literary journals over a few decades), it seems that Richard Tillinghast would be a household name in Bluff City.

Born and raised in Memphis, Tillinghast could be at least a local legend if he were a great poet. His seventh collection, Six Mile Mountain, proves again that he is a decent and competent poet, but remains incapable of writing a focused masterwork of universal scope that will outlive him.

Ironically, in the few poems where he is most local—the ones in which he recalls his boyhood Memphis and father—the book has the most global appeal. The stellar poem "My Father's Glen Plaid Jacket" begins with the object itself, the jacket: "The label says Oak Hall Memphis. Its oak clusters evoke/ a banquet hall." Then the narrative unwinds into a visceral memory: "But it's my Dad's jacket. His sweat must still be somewhere in the satin lining".

In a vulnerable moment, he slips into the jacket to "wear the thousand times he put it on/to drink old fashioneds." Next he recalls that his father mostly wore the jacket to church, a tradition he continues. As the author/speaker notices the similarities between himself and his father, he becomes aware of the numinous and perhaps unattainable grace for which they long, asking for Divine will to be done "whether or not we can quite follow it." Both father and son transmute into single entity, a "we." " We sweated in a white collar for our daily bread", and an awareness seeps into the poem and the characters' relationship, making them cognizant of "the kingdom, the power, the glory" that binds life with mystery. While poems such as the one quoted above show Tillinghast fully capable of writing work that integrates themes and subject matter artfully, he rarely exercises such mastery in this collection.

Many of the poems suffer from references to his feelings (spare us) that are not interwoven with larger themes and material. Also, the context of most of the poems relies on unoriginal perceptions of the world and cliched version of reality. The forced, sentimental homage to Grateful Dead guitar hero, Jerry Garcia, exercises many of these unflattering poetic abuses.

Titled after a trademark song of an era, the best lines in "A Box of Rain" are snippets of song lyrics from the band, which is bad news for a poet. Here are the first two lines of the poem, the first by the Dead's lyricist (though the poet changed the pronoun from "I" to "you" of the first line in a meek attempt to make the music into myth) and the second by Tillinghast: "You lit out from Reno, you were trailed by twenty hounds./And yet it's hard to think of you gone". In the worst possible clash of language the poet mixes heady conceits and bland colloquialisms. First, the poet/character speaks of hearing notes through "the incorporeality of your guitar." Later, he tells us he has the band's album "cranked up real loud." He pronounces the obvious "You were Jerry Garcia, you were Captain Trips," compares Garcia to a "big furry cat who looked like he slept in his clothes,' then to the most base cliché "an open and closed book of life." The poem ends with an implication that Garcia was a songbird, then the statement as flat as a worn doormat "And now/you too are gone." While Garcia may stand as an icon of a generation, Tillinghast proves with this effort that he is not the poet of the same generation. This poem is one of many such low moments in the collection.

About a third of the collection is composed of poems set in an Irish landscape, complete with a slight verbal/grammatical affectation to make it seems like a sincere attempt. These poems are not bad, nor are they great. At the very least, they contain some nice lines like this opening stanza of "His Days":

When one of his black moods bedeviled him,
When the wince of some remembered pain—
Some wrong done to him, some cruelty of his own—
Hurt him like a surge melting down
Bad wiring, what choice was left him
But to flinch and swallow and bear it like a man?