In the cover notes to Richard Tillinghast's second book of poems, The Knife and Other Poems …, James Dickey dubs the author "the best poet of the younger generation." Now James Dickey is no easy critic to satisfy, and indeed one cannot read Tillinghast's poems without being impressed by the considerable skill they display. One listens in admiration, for example, to frequent virtuoso verbal performances:

           The cold moon led us coldly
            —three men in a motorboat—
           down foggy canals before dawn
            past cut sugarcane in December….

Such passages [as this one from "Shooting Ducks in South Louisiana"] characterize the poetry, evidencing the poet's sharp ear and his attention to the nuances of rhythmic variations. Sound is indeed masterfully handled here, as is space, the lines creatively exploring the printed page throughout. In these verbal matters, as in much of the imagery and in the occasional explicit attributions to his predecessors, Tillinghast's debt to the Symbolists is apparent. Yet his is a distinctive, independent voice with a great deal to say.

Despite the obvious quality of the craftsmanship, though, there is in many of the poems a disturbing sense of the unfulfilled, the fragmentary, a troubling disjunction that, at least for this reader, militates more against than for the poetry…. It is disappointing … [to feel that a significant number of the poems] tend toward shrillness and away from the inner cohesion that might bring them effectively to fruition. One would like less jostling of the reader's sense of unity and direction. What makes the impression doubly disappointing is the contrast furnished by a superb, tightly-unified poem "The Knife."… Here is a masterly poem of feeling, of drama, and of technical excellence whose two and a third pages summon more power, more emotion, than the rambling "Today in the Café Trieste," whose loose twelve-page meditation closes the volume.

Richard Tillinghast is indeed a skilled poet, particularly when he chooses to exercise his considerable talent and vision in less immediately self-conscious and labored verses. Poems like "Return," the beautiful reverie that opens the volume, are ample proof that when he is good, he is very good. One does not like to disagree with so acute a critic as Dickey, but one has at the same time to wonder whether his conferral of the laurels has not been a bit premature. It might be more prudent to defer the accolades just a bit and to consider the direction of Tillinghast's future verse. If the present volume stands as a fair indication. Tillinghast may well grow into those laurels in the near future. (pp. 89-90)