[In Sleep Watch, Richard Tillinghast's first book,] the words lie so close to the skin that the speaking voice and the poetic voice are one. These poems are so delicate, so Proustian! What Beckett says about Proust is true of Tillinghast: "The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day." There is an incessant coming alive of images, a stirring of the heart, the langourous speech of evocation. So much is here! I suppose the poems are like our lives: they create spaces, drifting absently from one moment to the next, remembering to themselves epiphanies which have no explanation. It is as if one were to awaken having forgotten all that was before; then every instant becomes a history, a past, forging from the eye's experience an impression of what it means to be alive.

No one else...