Richard Tillinghast, a native of Memphis, Tennessee, first came to Kinvara, County Galway, for a year in 1990 and has long since been a distinctive presence on the Irish literary scene. He now lives in South Tipperary. Introduced by poet and critic Dennis O'Driscoll, Selected Poems is Tillinghast’s tenth book of poems and gathers the poet’s own choice of some forty years of his work. Tillinghast’s poems range confidently among different cultures. He has a sense of history as a living force. His experiments in meter, rhyme, and free verse are important. He is a wonderfully gifted poet, one of the few. -Louis Simpson