[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 is writing poems like those in Sleep Watch; Tillinghast has studied with Robert Lowell, and some of the early poems, collected in Part Three 1959–1963, reflect that influence, the diction and high rhetoric of Lord Weary's Castle, intense, disturbed, allusive. "A Poem on the Nuclear War, From Pompeii" imitates the didactic metaphysical style Lowell assumed in Near the Ocean…. Others resemble more Merwin or Donald Justice in their surrealism, in their silence, and "The Creation of the Animals" could have been written by James Dickey. But the rest (and it is a long first book) have about them that fixity which derives from an individual consciousness projecting the world, "Floating pale and wavy through / The murky waters of Schopenhauer."

Tillinghast's I Ching, which provides an epigraph to the book, "describes a wanderer who knows how to limit his desires outwardly, though he is inwardly strong and aspiring…. He is persistently conscious of being a stranger in a strange land." And it is in this, the separation of the ego from its own identity, the reluctance to complain, with Lowell, "I'm not myself" that establishes a distance between the poet and the objects of his world: books, lovers, his father "R.C.T." Forever catching himself in thought during the long hours of insomnia, late at night, or aware of the dark quality of afternoon light, Tillinghast manages to achieve what Baudelaire recognized in le Confiteor: that "There are certain delicious sensations whose vagueness does not exclude intensity." The precise, the hollow, and the beautiful mingle with ease among the lines. Everything seems so far away, the words are talking among themselves…. (pp. 134-35)

There is in Tillinghast's poetry what one finds in Robert Bly's: the motion of the inanimate. Nothing is ever still. The world surprises, we are astonished by the odd, the stunning…. [Poems such as "News of the Human Universe" are] an expression of the secret knowledge that there are other worlds beyond use…. (p. 136)

Even when he writes about himself, Tillinghast conceals confession beneath a pose of ennui, a sarcasm of the casual…. Refusing to take on importance, to see himself as other than a figure emerging from the darkened houses of his own experience, Tillinghast knows the frail significance of things, the hidden substance of his life in what surrounds him. (pp. 136-37)