The Stonecutter's Hand. By Richard Tillinghast. Boston: David Godine, 1995. Pp. 96 $19.95

Review by Bruce Bond, reproduced from the Michigan Quarterly Review

Richard Tillinghast's fifth book, The Stonecutter's Hand, is not less compulsive in its pursuit of beauty, though such beauty, embodied as it is in the Victorian reading rooms, Persian mosques, and gutted abbeys of his poems, is characteristically the artifice of the well-wrought object, often archaic, conspicuously and convincingly worked. The measured and poised language of these poems has well testified to Tillinghast's affection for careful, disciplined craftsmanship. Less explosive, mercurial, and ecstatic than Kasischke's lines, Tillinghast's typically have a certain resilience, weight, and finish, as if each were a chiseled stone in a stanza of stones, something to resist wear like the "proven leather" and stenciled glass of the opening poem, "Anatolian Journey":

               Impedimenta of the self
   Left behind somewhere, or traded
   For a bag with good straps, a book of Turkish proverbs,
   Sandals of proven leather,
   A bottle of water called, yes, "Life"
   In the language of the country-pine trees
                            stenciled on the glass.

Most obviously "impediments of the self" refers to the impediments which constitute the self, left behind to prepare the way for the books romancing of travel, negative capability, and what the poems calls "the fragrance of remoteness." But the ambiguity of the "of" allows for a subtler, somewhat paradoxical notion, equally central to the book-that the impediments which comprise the self are also those which impede it, that the self is most fully realized when it is elsewhere, imaginatively driven, irrepressively thrown.

What follows is a thoughtful exploration of the compulsion to travel, the fearful pleasure of "crossing boundaries," including the temporal and metaphysical. With each crossing, the poems enact or celebrate some shift in identity, though often with a renewed sense of the self's essential solitude. In the poem "Passage," for example, the speaker, in conscious contrast to Yeats, prays for his children to travel widely, to go out into the more exotic reaches of the world, however hazardous. But not long after this comes Tillinghast's irrepressible call for restraint:

     May you study maps, count suitcases, always remember
     What pockets you keep things of value in.
     The self exists on the far side of a border;
     First crossings can seem a trifle strange.

Granted, this last line is not one of Tillinghast's strongest, hinging as it does on such a weak qualification, but his overarching strategy of contradiction works well here and elsewhere. The cautious sensibility of the craftsman becomes that of the protective father, torn between magnanimity and attachment. In fact, Tillinghast's sensibility is not so diametrically opposed to Yeats's after all, nor to Dr. Johnson's, for that matter, whose words provide the poem's epigraph: "The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are."

The effect of such a lavishly embodied imagination is poems which make a convincing case for the world's abundance. Although much of the book longs impossibly for a lost past, it likewise insists on the overwhelming plentitude of experience, as in the poem "The Table," in which a man "filled with the gladness of living" keeps piling things on a table, amazed at their sheer variety and the table's sturdiness beneath them: "Now that's what I call a table!" he says, as if he were praising a particular poetic as well, one that aspired to "hold up" however imperfectly the particulars of experience.

And like this table, the archaic objects in Tillinghast's, poems hold a kind of historical abundance, including the abundance of mystery that comes with history's erasures. What fascinates him repeatedly about the places in his travels is the way they bear the faintly legible inscription of their past, both personal and cultural, how history leaves behind a build-up of glyphs and scars, of partial narratives. Savannah is haunted by "its million tongues," Manhattan (the paradigm of the postmodern city) by its "discordant concordance" of traffic. Again and again Tillinghast's world is palimpsest of traces and ciphers.

And just as things become a kind of language, made semi-transparent as such, so too is language viewed as a king of thing, more specifically as a tool, a means of conveyance-as in one of the book's most thematically resonant poems, "Transport." Here the evolution of transportation, from slype to cart to tractor, parallels that of language, especially poetic language, driven as it is by erotic longing and a sublimation into discipline. And what powers that desire is in part the sense of a tradition pushing the language forward, ever redefining itself and the threshold of the new:

     Likewise I, though at first as dumb
     As any boy, and as diffident,
     Have been transported in vehicles I hadn't
     The imagination to posit, and at first never dreamed
     Of intensities beyond the moment
     I might be carried to--where a woman's plummy
     Thighs opened to a salty
     Updraft of quickened wings flying home
     To an unvisited interior. This was poetry.

Poems such as "Transport," "History of Windows," "The Adirondack," "Twos," and "Savannah, Sleeping" stand as some of the most memorable and haunting in the book, in large part because the sensual and uncanny imagery in them makes for quietly epiphanic moments.

While the strength of Tillinghast's poems lies in part in their honesty, thoughtfulness, and clarity, the poems come alive especially when they are a bit less readily available to the understanding, when the imagery seems saturated in the unconscious. "A History of Windows" provides a good example--a successful poem thanks to the agility of its movement and surprise of its correspondences. Once again, like "Transport," the poem uses the skeleton of historical narrative to work its way into more introspective territory-namely the Eros of loss and inscrutability. Thus at the conclusion of its brief history of windows, the poem turns suddenly inward toward the deepest recesses of the pre-natal mind:

     A line-squall rattles our summer-cottage glass,
     The children run in, dissolving me back again
     To birth-soup, ultimate wetness, broken waters.
     I sense light up ahead, and swim toward windows.

These lines focus what is so gratifying about the collection as a whole-how it testifies to an insatiable intellect, swimming toward one window after another, lured by the prospects of liberation and memory. In their investigations, Tillinghast's poems are compassionate and self-aware, generous with their attentions, humbled and delighted by the world's plentitude, sweetened by loss, haunted by a reliquary of things and a shadowy imagination of hands that made them.

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