Richard Tillinghast and Alan Williamson

7 APRIL 2011 — thursday

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Richard Tillinghast, Dirty August, and Alan Williamson, The Pattern More Complicated, New and Selected PoemsMoe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

More about the readers
Richard Tillinghast is an American poet currently living in Ireland. In his Selected Poems, he has picked the best of his ten books of poems from four decades of his poetry. Louis Simpson has said, "Tillinghast's poems range confidently among different cultures. He has a sense of history as a living force." He has also published three nonfiction books, including Damaged Grandeur, a critical biography of Robert Lowell with whom he studied at Harvard, a book on Irish literature and culture, and a new book, Dirty August, a book of translations of the Turkish poet Edip Cansever that he co-translated with his daughter, Julia Clare Tillinghast.

Alan Williamson, who also studied with Lowell at Harvard, is a celebrated poet and critic. His most recent book of poems is The Pattern More Complicated, New and Selected Poems; Thomas Disch says, "If there were such a school as maximalism in poetry, Alan Williamson would be on the board of directors. His poems aim at the high sublime, and his aim is usually good." Four of Williamson's previous books are selected from in this volume, including The Muse of Distance, Love and the Soul, Res Publica, and Presence. He has also published four books of criticism and other prose, most recently Westernness: A Meditation, a first-person meditation on the literary and visual arts of the American West.