The stonecutter's hand

the long version

The Stonecutter's Hand, Richard Tillinghast's fifth and finest collection of verse, is the first in a decade from a writer whom James Dickey has called "the best poet of the younger generation, and deserving of more recognition than most of the poets in the older generation: that is, mine and the one beyond it.". Demonstrating Tillinghast's characteristic elegance and a new emotional openness, The Stonecutter's Hand extols the virtues and pleasures of travel, whether in the "sooty and Dickensian" chimney-pots of Galway or "the discordant concordance/of Manhattan - built-up, weighed-down, put upon." At the same time, Tillinghast shows an attunement to the tragedies and ironies of history, from the effects of World War II on the American psyche to the destruction of aristocratic Anglo-Irish culture in Ireland. And he is equally adept at chronicling metaphysical transports, the quiet pleasures of a "luminous and uneventful" day, or the ever-renewable mysteries of nature. Richly imagined and superbly crafted, Tillinghast's poems have all the strength, resonance, and finesse of a sculptor's masterstroke.