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The New Life |
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The New Life, which takes its title from Dante’s celebration of courtly love, La Vita Nuova, is a journey through romantic love, the deaths of old friends, the ironies of history, and the losses and epiphanies of a long life of exploration and discovery. |
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“Lick of white” on “the woodwork framing a north-facing window.” “Treachery/and the blandness and stupidity” and the “marks (they’ve) maded on the heart.” Between these opposing poles, The New Life charts its human course. There’s no going back to innocence for sullied creatures like ourselves, but achingly captured in these poems is that perdurable wish. And in freshwater lines of poetry - the purest, most limpid he has ever written - Richard Tillinghast finds something “the polluted tides of history” have not yet overwhelmed. Dylan Thomas flowered early, Wallace Stevens late. Tillinghast keeps re-blooming, reinventing, re-imagining, born and born again. At the heart of The New Life is a fire that warms and brightens and burns beyond “the cold miles of the galaxies.” It is a gift that will not go out. And we are grateful for it.
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