If, as is often said, the experience of outliving the 1960s was one from which my generation never fully recovered, it is surprising how little it has shown up in our poetry…. One critic, Paul Breslin, has seen in our recent low-profile surrealism, with its insistent imagery of dulling, of withdrawal—"stones and bones poetry," as it is pejoratively known—the reflection of a discouragement that is partly political; but the surrealist poets themselves would be the last to dwell on such a connection. Richard Tillinghast is a poet who became intensely involved in the California Counterculture at the end of the decade, and left his academic career for several years. His book The Knife seems to me an important one, partly because of its frontal address to this side of our generational experience…. [The] climactic long poem "Today in the Cafe Trieste" is perhaps too frontal, especially...