REVIEW: Richard Tillinghast’s Night Train to Memphis Reviewed
by Lawrence Rhu
In Night Train to Memphis (Buffalo, NY: White Pine Press, 2025), Richard Tillinghast returns home. He has travelled widely and alertly during his time away, so he brings back clear memories and shareable insights from his experiences along the way. Those experiences include writing a baker’s dozen of previous poetry collections and several travel books, as well as a practical awareness of modern and earlier poetic traditions in English and other tongues. Such devotion to his craft enables him to translate moments in transit and subsequent reflections into poems whose candor and sincerity welcome general readers into both their mysteries and commonplaces.
In “Skylark” Richard riffs on Shelley and Ella Fitzgerald and shares with two pals a fantasy of rebuilding a ’53 Buick Skylark. Their dream transports them so completely that it alone is enough: “So what if we never found her? / We three amigos steering her / down the great highway in our dreams / – that’s as real as anything.” Likewise, “Emblems” affirms the powers of imagination by considering three small items on a tabletop: a miniature sailing ship, a bronze dolphin, and a Japanese bowl. “When the dolphin / leaps and the bowl / fills, and when / the ship / slips harbor // I swing onboard / hearing the music of its taut-strung lines / as wind fills the sails / and dailiness / is left behind in port.”
Yet despite such confident flights and “taut-strung lines,” Richard’s poems face up to hard facts of history and acknowledge their stubborn, irrepressible persistence. In “Skylark,” for example, the car of their dreams is a fleeting by-product of what President Eisenhauer called “the military industrial complex”: “How brief her moment was / born from the uplift of power / that sank the aircraft // carriers of the rising sun, / bombed the libraries and concert halls / of men who murdered the Jews of Europe / and stacked their skulls in the world’s imagination.”
I call the speaker of these poems by their author’s first name because he recounts his experience and relates his feelings with an ease and openness that invite such familiarity. As I hear his words, I drop my guard. Their tone makes me feel at home and reluctant to overcorrect for the occasion of such a review. Since Night Train to Memphis details Richard’s journey home, it is, like The Odyssey, a nostos or homecoming, if only, or mainly, in memory and imagination.
As the title poem puts it, “If Memphis were Jerusalem I’d be a Jew” and it further explains, “Every trip home is / a pilgrimage into the self. / What other way is there / to find out who you are?” One couldn’t be more direct than that, and the poem continues, “I need to follow my footsteps backward, / into my childhood – / so I can enter the sanctuary of becoming.”
Of course, sanctuaries and childhoods may be places in the heart as much as they are chronological stages of life and geographical locales. In “Night Train to Memphis,” I hear Richard riffing on Constantine Cavafy’s “Ithaca,” where the poet says to Odysseus, “Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage. / Without her you would never have taken the road. / But she has nothing more to give you. // And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not defrauded you. / With the great wisdom you have gained, with so much experience, / you must surely have understood by then what Ithaca means.”
Cavafy’s Alexandria was once a thoroughly Hellenized Egyptian city, and, like its Egyptian namesake on the Nile, Memphis, Tennessee, is a river town. It’s easy to imagine Richard’s mind reaching playfully for such associations to represent homes for the heart of his own odyssey. Besides, Richard has written about Cavafy elsewhere. At the close of Istanbul: City of Forgetting and Remembering, he concludes with a discussion of “Ithaca.” He calls Cavafy “the patron saint of poets who love the demotic civilization of the eastern Mediterranean” and tells us that Cavafy wrote “the first of his poems that survive in Constantinople, the city of forgetting and remembering.”
Besides improvising his own variations on “Ithaca” in Night Train to Memphis, Richard also revives Sultan Beyazit from Istanbul, whose story he tells in its second-to-last chapter. The poem is called “The Self” and recounts the saintly sultan’s struggle with his appetites once a craving for “sheep’s feet” overwhelms his customary asceticism. It may sound like a struggle between body and soul, but it raises the question: what is the self? Both-and or either-or? It turns out that the Sultan has two selves, or so it seems, because one must die first, then the other, and each requires a separate burial. Or so it went with this sultan, Beyazit II, who established the first imperial mosque complex in Constantinople, which dates from 1506.
Richard’s seven-league boots have taken him far and wide, as his poems reflect in an appealingly demotic style. He has a knack for proverbial expression if we consider proverbs as sayings or adages that circulate widely (or could) yet retain their freshness and remain pertinent when aptly brought to bear. Richard grew up in the Baptist church, graduated from an Episcopal college, and attended Harvard as a graduate student – three protestant institutions who could readily explain their differences at length, but whose preachers and professors you might likely find in a meditation circle or yoga class with no apparent need to explain. Likewise, his poems glancingly summon familiar phrases which remind us of the eloquence of the King James Bible. Yet such echoes complement and sustain proverbial tones in certain lyrics. They don’t sound doctrinal or churchy.
During his first tenure-track job at UC – Berkeley, Richard met a Sufi master and gradually became acquainted with the spiritual subculture in the Bay area. He writes about these developments engagingly in various prose works which I recommend highly, but one remark that particularly stands out for me goes like this: “The writings of Hazrat Inayat Khan speak of developing the capacity of attuning oneself to the atmosphere of holy places like the shrine at Konya, and for me this traditional Sufi practice is not far from the famous sense of place that Southerners are supposed to have.” In The Knife and other poems (1980), “Eight Lines by Jalal-ud-din Rimi” unforgettably engages with a poem from that mystical tradition which subsequently made its way into the Unitarian Universalist hymnal.
Of course, a travel writer should develop such a capacity too, as should a poet. In Night Train to Memphis, you will find poems that may take you somewhere you’ve never traveled and yet reach a place you readily come to understand and gratefully hear confirmed, somehow, to exist. Proverbs and adages may have this effect. They may express what philosophers call “perennial wisdom” when it gains some traction. Speaking of the homeless and down-and-out in terms from Scripture and classical iconography, “The Feast of the Hungry” reveals both self-doubt and deep sympathy in concluding, “Why am I telling you this? It’s certain / that those at the top of fortune’s wheel / will never tire of feasting and making merry. / As for the poor, they are as Jesus said / they always are. Our headlights illumine them / along the garbage-strewn freeway / in their tents and lean-tos.”
“A Spy in the House of Pain” takes us into San Quentin where Richard taught for three years and “To Whoever Broke into My Cabin” takes us to Sonoma County near Freestone where Richard suspects the culprit is a drug addict of his acquaintance. Via Junior Wells singing “somebody done hoodooed the hoodoo man” and imagining the addict having “scored by now” and thus “feeling all kicked back and mellow,” Richard works through his anger and suspicions to recognize and directly express his sense of violation and his fury: “Let’s talk you bastard. / There’s lots of things we could talk about— / Self-respect, or friendship. / We could even talk about who you are, / because I think I know.” We can appreciate that such straightforwardness in this regard is a recent achievement if we again return to The Knife (1980), where “The Thief” represents Richard’s earlier effort to reckon with this traumatic event.
As these few citations show, Richard’s poems travel far, both inside and out, and they pay attention to where they have been and might go. They memorably record a wide range of epiphanies in language and images we can readily share and enjoy if we pay attention too.
Lawrence Rhu is the Todd Professor of the Italian Renaissance, emeritus, at the University of South Carolina. He has published books and essays about the American and European Renaissances and edited Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. His poems have appeared in Poetry, North Dakota Quarterly, One, and other journals. They have won awards from the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society of New Orleans and the Poetry Societies of both North and South Carolina. His collection of poems, Pre-owned Odyssey & Rented Rooms was published by Main Street Rag in 2024. It records a pilgrimage by Prius, plane, bicycle, streetcar, and minivan – most of them used, pre-owned, or secondhand.
