Richard Tillinghast's "The Knife and Other Poems" is a haunted book. Ghosts of all sorts abound in its pages: visions of lost love, images of the poet's former self, the presence—and sometimes the words—of earlier poets, as in the poems "after" Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rilke. Faces stare out of old photographs; snatches of song—Janis Joplin, Dylan—drift in from what is already a vanished era. The theme of return, introduced in the first poem, recurs throughout the volume; but its burden is that the longing is futile: You can't go home again. And, not surprisingly, counterpoint appears in the theme of leave-taking. There is even a literal act of conjuring in "Lost Cove & The Rose of San Antone," where the poet, meditating over his bourbon in California, dreams up a man drinking in Lost Cove, Tenn., in 1938, and then must lock his door in fear as...