Three other recent books of poetry are Six Mile Mountain (2000), Story Line Press, The Stonecutter's Hand (1995), David R. Godine, and Today in the Cafe Trieste (1997), new and selected poems issued by Salmon Publishing in Ireland.
He has also reviewed and written literary essays for The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The New Criterion, as well as writing travel articles for the Times.
Using both free verse and formal constraint to shape and sharpen his examinations of historical and personal events, Tillinghast is often concerned with the elusive nature of home.
Richard Tillinghast performs that office with an honesty so strict that over and over his poems prove themselves faithful in ways that bring a quiet, undisputed delight."
In sinewy lines and solid stanzas—fruits of a lifetime's devotion to the craft—Tillinghast's most recent poems, undoubtedly his finest to date, fuse a sobering sense of mortality with the exhilaration of renewal, indeed rejuvenation, through love."
He and his daughter Julia Clare Tillinghast have collaborated on a book of translations from the poetry of Edip Cansever (1928–1986), Dirty August, published in 2009 by Talisman House.
He has also been a Director of The Poets' House in Ireland, and founder of the Bear River Writer's Conference held annually near Petoskey, Michigan on Walloon Lake.
Tillinghast has also done performance poetry: he released a poetry/music CD, My Only Friends Were the Wolves, with the Ann Arbor-based jazz fusion band Poignant Plecostomus in 1997.
Tillinghast has moved back to the US after living for five years in County Tipperary, Ireland, and now divides his time between Tennessee and the Big Island of Hawaii.