I was first drawn to Richard Tillinghast as a confessional poet, in the poems about marriage and separation that actually make up less than one-fifth of his first volume, Sleep Watch. They were painful poems, yet held so much more self-forgiveness, more room for the lyrical, than most such poems do—the speaker's erotic utopianism neither psychoanalyzed down to mere compulsion, nor used as a Byronic excuse for his sometimes egocentric conduct….

On reading the entire book, I find these poems and their images extraordinarily deepened by their connections with poems which, though introspective and Freudian enough, are far from confessional; poems that deal with nostalgia and fright, not in terms of the situations that release them, but as permanent and independent categories of inner experience. To accomplish this, Tillinghast often uses "sleep watch" states (dozing, insomnia, near-hallucination), in which the external world remains present, yet is wholly...