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 in the use of Ginsberg, quite to succeed as poetry. But elsewhere in the book the theme is turned around and looked at from many subtler, more indirect angles. "Hearing of the End of the War"—despite, or even by virtue of, the idyllic Colorado setting—conjures up the sense of numbed disconnection which that event, so long delayed, so little of a victory for any side in America, brought with it…. "The Thief," on the other hand, belongs implicitly to the years of Altamont and Manson, when it became clear that the dark side of indiscriminate "liberation" was something more than a bugbear of the conservatives. The literal thief, who preys on the speaker in his country retreat, is hard to distinguish from the speaker's own impulse to despoil himself of culture, riches, blood-tainted traditions and ceremonies…. For this reason, even his terror after the burglary has an element of losing one's life to find it. Things grow sharper, more special, on the edge of vanishing, like the ordinary deer seen "crashing off gazelle-like into the trees." In his constant state of apprehension, the speaker lives in a world of magic and omens…. But it is too much: things are violated, invaded, as much as they are set free; he feels he touches everything through a layer of broken "glass stuck to my fingers." And in the end, he is glad to feel the tug of the network, however attenuated, of conventional human relations. In a parallel poem, "Return," the speaker, again living alone in the woods experiences a Whitmanesque diffusion of self into the things and people he sees. Yet he speaks of himself in the third person, as if his life were somehow alienated from him by its too composed perfection. (pp. 247-49)

The Knife, in sum, bids a long farewell to the project of instant and continuous transcendence (of society and the habitual self) that was so real, to so many people, twelve years back. The second part of the book explores the question of what politics, if any, remain available to the poet. In the most ambitious poem, "Today in the Cafe Trieste," unease with the world-consuming commodity culture the poet has returned to … clashes head on with a reluctantly but increasingly terrible image of the successful revolutionary, "Mao Tse-Tung, not so big as the ear/ of his portrait." The poem is so divided between the two feelings that it lacks a center, emotionally and formally. Elsewhere, the underclass has the poet's sympathy, with a frank edge of middle-class envy; yet he does not evade the horror of its all-too-civilized moral rootlessness…. If he sometimes suggests that our kind of civilization is both doomed to corrupt the world, and just plain doomed, his sense of more permanent values can come from unexpected sources: the family loyalties of a Southern childhood ("The Knife") as well as the "family" certain 1960s comrades constituted for him. "At borders, think," one poem advises; and what one admires about the political poems at their best is a kind of stoic, unideological clear-sightedness, more characteristic of European poets like Milosz and Tranströmer than of most contemporary Americans. (pp. 249-50)

[Tillinghast's] is a poetry carefully made, phrase by phrase, so that it often succeeds in incising itself on one's memory. If it also lacks something, a darting speed, a playfulness with language, when compared with Tillinghast's first volume, Sleep Watch (1969)—well, that too is part of the plot. Indeed, one of the things I admire about the Tillinghast of The Knife is his flat acknowledgment of dispirited and even rather nasty feelings—ending a poem about a hunting trip, for instance,

          I plucked a purple feather from his dead wing,
          and wore the life of that bird in my hat.

This tone is rare in poetry, though more mannered, more romanticized, self-condemnations are not. (p. 250)