Overview
From the sandy pine hills and river bluffs of North Louisiana to the cypress swamps and reedy marshes of South Louisiana—from the Ozarks to the Gulf—David Middleton celebrates, in evocative descriptions and compelling stories, the flora and fauna, the history and prehistory, the geography and the people, of his native state. But like Robert Frost’s New England or Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, Middleton’s Louisiana becomes the locale of readily sharable universal human experiences: love, death, war, religion, art, family, and friends. Standing atop Driskill Mountain, the highest point of elevation in Louisiana, the poet-as-fiddler affirms his calling in life: For that’s what bow and strings are for, To raise things up in song Between The Fall and Paradis And urge the world along. Taken as a whole, the poems in this volume confirm Middleton as the preeminent inheritor among living poets of the Southern Agrarian Literary Tradition. In addition to the full poems of Middleton’s previously published works*, Time Will Tell includes 50 years of selected, new, uncollected, and previously unpublished poems, written 1973-2023. *The Burning Fields (LSU Press, 1991), Beyond the Chandeleurs (LSU Press, 1999), The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy: Poems After Pictures by Jean-FranÇois Millet (LSU Press, 2005), The Fiddler of Driskill Hill (LSU Press, 2013), Outside the Gates of Eden (Measure Press, 2021).
Reviews
Praise for Outside the Gates of Eden ""For several decades early in the last century, the writers of the American South published some of our most important literature--works of religious seriousness, historical scope, traditional reverence, moral reckoning, and formal dexterity. The heirs to such achievements have been few. David Middleton is one of the best among them. In his few but distinguished books, he has again and again brought us poems where the profound beauty of meter joins with the high themes of human life, where rootedness in place is joined with metaphysical vision. He is surely one of the finest living poets of the American South and a poet destined long to be read by everyone with an ear for music and an eye for classical precision."" --James Matthew Wilson ""David Middleton develops in this new volume major panels of his vision. Announced by his title, the Judeo-Christian tradition underpins the whole. Among other sources of inspiration are the classics, nature, great Southern figures, and twentieth-century rural and small-town South, treated with deep reverence and sentiment. Graphic art, one of Middleton's longtime concerns, provides material for many fine poems, generally ekphrastic and based on work by Poussin, Constable, and Millet. Fittingly, death must occupy a place. ""The Potter's Epitaph"" joins the two themes, death and art, strikingly. The poet's moving word-pictures illustrate his sweeping vision, pastoral but, of necessity, reflecting the flawed human condition, broken after Eden."" --Catharine Savage Brosman ""In the time and distance between Grecian lindens and Louisiana oaks, there are few gates that David Middleton cannot peer through in his search for meaning in the poetry of earthly life, with its mythologies, histories, paintings, fellow poets, and landscapes. His observations in Outside the Gates of Eden are told and revealed with the highest poetic craft and art."" --John P. Doucet ""These beautifully structured poems show . . . contrasts between life now and that of the once-perfect Eden. All are elegant, stately, and carefully constructed. Middleton's well-chiseled poetry, centered on what 'Eden' means, captures brilliantly many elements of life--its challenges, loves, austerities, and wisdom--in such a way that clearly elevates Middleton to the position of one of the most important American poets alive today."" --Olivia Pass ""Vibrating with the fathomless question of human being, these poems pay homage to all that mends our minds and souls as we wander the world, exiles of an ever-remembered Eden. Erudite without being oblique, written in measures and yet bursting with primordial verve, Middleton's verse partakes of the great, centuries-old conversation while wrestling new yields from its words and the Word."" --Joshua Hren ""At once quietly perceptive and cosmically directed, Middleton's poems unfold the ontologic mystery of existence, even as they remind us of God's immediacy in our revealed creation."" --Dappled Things, Emma Mason Praise for The Fiddler of Driskill Hill ""'To be national in literature, ' wrote William Gilmore Simms, 'one must needs be sectional.' Middleton's finely crafted, almost classical poems, grounded in the English poetic tradition, allow him to 'defend and illustrate' the genius loci of Louisiana in its human and topographical variety and its deep historical and cultural meaning. Through this close attention to people, locales, and seasons, his writing underlines broad truths and demonstrates that what the collection calls 'the rhythms of poiesis and this place' are those of human life in general. Middleton's contributions to American poetry cannot be doubted."" --Catharine Savage Brosman ""David Middleton commands contemporary poetry with a Proustian imagination, and he is surely one of Mnemosyne's brightest descendants making poems in the world today. In The Fiddler of Driskill Hill this master poet reminds us that remembering still can be a sacred act, that each thing we call a poem is a sacred vessel, and that the poet descended into mindful remembering acquires a voice that is itself descended from the sacred. The Fiddler of Driskill Hill expands history and love poem and hymn to include the experiences and the memories of a poet who knows the music of the line and the song the poem is a few other working poets do."" --Darrell Bourque ""Except for David Middleton, I can name no other contemporary poet whose work I would choose to describe as stately. In his case, this rare quality is achieved through technical mastery, devoted labor, judicious sympathy, and loving contemplation. The Fiddler of Driskill Hill is the best work to date, a splendid achievement in its every aspect. There is variety in plenty in the pages - speakers and stories from times past and present, folktales, tributes to personages who do not often receive tributes - but this variety is made harmonious by the power of a vision both equable and passionate. Here is poetry for the ages."" --Fred Chappell Praise for Beyond the Chandeleurs ""Pervaded by a profound Christian sensibility and controlled by a highly disciplined respect for the poetic craft, the poems in Beyond the Chandeleurs are a series of remarkably evocative meditations on the mystery of God revealed to the poet in his relationships with persons, contemporary and historical--his parents, his grandparents, a Sunday school teacher, the yeoman farmers of north Louisiana; in his experience of places and events--visiting Oak Alley Plantation, studying the battle of Franklin, Tennessee, in 1864, making a journey to appear at a literary conference; and in his experience of the natural world and its creatures as they exist in his native Louisiana--'Azaleas in Epiphany, ' 'Blue Herons, ' 'Beyond the Chandeleurs.' A celebration of the reality of the mystery of God in the face of the amorality of the 'post-Christian age, ' Beyond the Chandeleurs may appropriately be called the work of a latter-day psalmist."" --Lewis P. Simpson ""David Middleton's powerful poetic imagination, rooted in Louisiana's history and its soils and waters--small towns, tilled fields, piney woods, hardwood forests, swamps, bayous--evokes familiar, circumscribed human dramas of love, joy, illness, and death in their social and natural settings, and at the same time reaches out to read the eloquent testimony of the stars, as they bear witness to the divine, universal Presence. His broad, sympathetic vision and the sense of order it implies are supported throughout by his seasoned command of formal verse. This new collection makes it clear that Middleton is among the most accomplished of southern poets now writing and the preeminent voice of Louisiana in verse today."" --Catharine Savage Brosman ""Bravely and independently, David Middleton walks his own way, making poems of great clarity and distinction, poems rooted in his faith, his sense of history, and his love for people and the natural world. Beyond the Chandeleurs proves him a poet of increasing depth and heightening stature. Readers will cherish his work, provided they care for tradition, accomplished music, and formal excellence."" --X. J. Kennedy ""David Middleton's densely wrought poetry demands the kind of close attention that most poets of our time do not ask. He rewards such attention with an original perspective and a searching meditative exploration of contemporary experience. He has sought to be among the 'seekers who would bring what they find / A loving objectivity of the mind.' His loving objectivity makes his poetry a unique and compelling achievement."" --Helen Trimpi Praise for The Burning Fields ""The Burning Fields has recovered for us the unfailing poetic theme, God and the mysteries of his creation. Fire destroys, but burning sugarcane stalks makes way for another crop and life. There is little abstract language here. Middleton's muse repeats in high clarity and blood feeling those cooperating opposites by means of which we display God's secret intentions. Quite properly this poet's Christian world is placed not in the Copernican but in the Ptolemaic order. David Middleton's poetry is a fresh and authoritative southern voice."" --Andrew Lytle ""I have known and admired the poetry of David Middleton for close to fifteen years. His theme is the recovery from the subjective mind. The recovery takes the form of orthodoxy in religion and traditional forms in literature, but these forms are not mere repetitions of the past. They are means by which Middleton can sharpen and illuminate his experience. Middleton does not believe in formalism for the sake of formalism. He adds a new edge to the leaf. He is one of the most important poets to come out of the South, or anywhere else for that matter."" --John Finlay Praise for The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy ""A powerful representation, in the music of vowels and consonants, of Millet's work . . . A major and memorable accomplishment."" --George Garrett ""A highly original and beautiful poetic sequence that translates into verbal terms not merely Millet's nineteenth-century would but the art itself, its lighting and shaping, its vision."" --Catharine Savage Brosman ""Middleton's empathies seem almost commensurate with those of the great painter and this book of poems, read alone or in companionship with the art, sounds a music that seems to rise from the earth that Millet embraced."" --Fred Chappell ""Both Millet's art and Middleton's poetry are immensely enriched by the intermingling of the two sensibilities. It is a remarkable experience to share this deliberate immersion in the sensibility of another, and a masterly achievement of Middleton's art."" --Helen Pinkerton Trimpi ""My favorite ekphrastic poems . . . Middleton usually begins with descriptions of [Jean-François Millet's] paintings, moving from foreground to background or from background to foreground, drawing our attention to significant yet easily missed details. From there he proceeds, often in the third or fourth stanzas, to possible allusions and to thematic reflections. . . . Middleton's poems helped me not only think about these paintings . . . in a deeper way. They helped me think feelingly about them. They drew me into a contemplative mood."" --Dappled Things, Steven Knepper Praise for David Middleton ""What has long intrigued me about Middleton's work as a poet is how humble it is regarding its own authority. The poems make their agrarian indictments of modernity. They look with reverence on the South's past, even as they confess its sins and know the resultant condition has proven tragic. They relish the possibility of verse to speak clearly and in an elevated but natural diction in iambic measures . . . Now, as that work approaches its end, it is time to discover the major poet who has lived among us, surveying the natural and spiritual terrain of the cosmos within the sacramental, flowering figure of Louisiana."" --The Catholic World Report, James Matthew Wilson ""David Middleton provides a novice with an excellent means of learning to read contemporary poetry. The meaning of his verse is not obscured by tortuous syntax, esoteric diction, or erudite allusion. He does not dazzle his reader with figurative pyrotechnics or lavishly contrived labyrinths of imagery. As a result, his work may appear deceptively simple . . . But read again, and yet again, and the rhythm and the verbal music of the verse will reveal more and more the beauty and subtlety of his carefully modulated language."" --Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, R. V. Young
Praise for Beyond the Chandeleurs ""Pervaded by a profound Christian sensibility and controlled by a highly disciplined respect for the poetic craft, the poems in Beyond the Chandeleurs are a series of remarkably evocative meditations on the mystery of God revealed to the poet in his relationships with persons, contemporary and historical--his parents, his grandparents, a Sunday school teacher, the yeoman farmers of north Louisiana; in his experience of places and events--visiting Oak Alley Plantation, studying the battle of Franklin, Tennessee, in 1864, making a journey to appear at a literary conference; and in his experience of the natural world and its creatures as they exist in his native Louisiana--'Azaleas in Epiphany, ' 'Blue Herons, ' 'Beyond the Chandeleurs.' A celebration of the reality of the mystery of God in the face of the amorality of the 'post-Christian age, ' Beyond the Chandeleurs may appropriately be called the work of a latter-day psalmist."" --Lewis P. Simpson ""David Middleton's powerful poetic imagination, rooted in Louisiana's history and its soils and waters--small towns, tilled fields, piney woods, hardwood forests, swamps, bayous--evokes familiar, circumscribed human dramas of love, joy, illness, and death in their social and natural settings, and at the same time reaches out to read the eloquent testimony of the stars, as they bear witness to the divine, universal Presence. His broad, sympathetic vision and the sense of order it implies are supported throughout by his seasoned command of formal verse. This new collection makes it clear that Middleton is among the most accomplished of southern poets now writing and the preeminent voice of Louisiana in verse today."" --Catharine Savage Brosman ""Bravely and independently, David Middleton walks his own way, making poems of great clarity and distinction, poems rooted in his faith, his sense of history, and his love for people and the natural world. Beyond the Chandeleurs proves him a poet of increasing depth and heightening stature. Readers will cherish his work, provided they care for tradition, accomplished music, and formal excellence."" --X. J. Kennedy ""David Middleton's densely wrought poetry demands the kind of close attention that most poets of our time do not ask. He rewards such attention with an original perspective and a searching meditative exploration of contemporary experience. He has sought to be among the 'seekers who would bring what they find / A loving objectivity of the mind.' His loving objectivity makes his poetry a unique and compelling achievement."" --Helen Trimpi Praise for Outside the Gates of Eden ""For several decades early in the last century, the writers of the American South published some of our most important literature--works of religious seriousness, historical scope, traditional reverence, moral reckoning, and formal dexterity. The heirs to such achievements have been few. David Middleton is one of the best among them. In his few but distinguished books, he has again and again brought us poems where the profound beauty of meter joins with the high themes of human life, where rootedness in place is joined with metaphysical vision. He is surely one of the finest living poets of the American South and a poet destined long to be read by everyone with an ear for music and an eye for classical precision."" --James Matthew Wilson ""David Middleton develops in this new volume major panels of his vision. Announced by his title, the Judeo-Christian tradition underpins the whole. Among other sources of inspiration are the classics, nature, great Southern figures, and twentieth-century rural and small-town South, treated with deep reverence and sentiment. Graphic art, one of Middleton's longtime concerns, provides material for many fine poems, generally ekphrastic and based on work by Poussin, Constable, and Millet. Fittingly, death must occupy a place. ""The Potter's Epitaph"" joins the two themes, death and art, strikingly. The poet's moving word-pictures illustrate his sweeping vision, pastoral but, of necessity, reflecting the flawed human condition, broken after Eden."" --Catharine Savage Brosman ""In the time and distance between Grecian lindens and Louisiana oaks, there are few gates that David Middleton cannot peer through in his search for meaning in the poetry of earthly life, with its mythologies, histories, paintings, fellow poets, and landscapes. His observations in Outside the Gates of Eden are told and revealed with the highest poetic craft and art."" --John P. Doucet ""These beautifully structured poems show . . . contrasts between life now and that of the once-perfect Eden. All are elegant, stately, and carefully constructed. Middleton's well-chiseled poetry, centered on what 'Eden' means, captures brilliantly many elements of life--its challenges, loves, austerities, and wisdom--in such a way that clearly elevates Middleton to the position of one of the most important American poets alive today."" --Olivia Pass ""Vibrating with the fathomless question of human being, these poems pay homage to all that mends our minds and souls as we wander the world, exiles of an ever-remembered Eden. Erudite without being oblique, written in measures and yet bursting with primordial verve, Middleton's verse partakes of the great, centuries-old conversation while wrestling new yields from its words and the Word."" --Joshua Hren ""At once quietly perceptive and cosmically directed, Middleton's poems unfold the ontologic mystery of existence, even as they remind us of God's immediacy in our revealed creation."" --Dappled Things, Emma Mason Praise for The Burning Fields ""The Burning Fields has recovered for us the unfailing poetic theme, God and the mysteries of his creation. Fire destroys, but burning sugarcane stalks makes way for another crop and life. There is little abstract language here. Middleton's muse repeats in high clarity and blood feeling those cooperating opposites by means of which we display God's secret intentions. Quite properly this poet's Christian world is placed not in the Copernican but in the Ptolemaic order. David Middleton's poetry is a fresh and authoritative southern voice."" --Andrew Lytle ""I have known and admired the poetry of David Middleton for close to fifteen years. His theme is the recovery from the subjective mind. The recovery takes the form of orthodoxy in religion and traditional forms in literature, but these forms are not mere repetitions of the past. They are means by which Middleton can sharpen and illuminate his experience. Middleton does not believe in formalism for the sake of formalism. He adds a new edge to the leaf. He is one of the most important poets to come out of the South, or anywhere else for that matter."" --John Finlay Praise for The Fiddler of Driskill Hill ""'To be national in literature, ' wrote William Gilmore Simms, 'one must needs be sectional.' Middleton's finely crafted, almost classical poems, grounded in the English poetic tradition, allow him to 'defend and illustrate' the genius loci of Louisiana in its human and topographical variety and its deep historical and cultural meaning. Through this close attention to people, locales, and seasons, his writing underlines broad truths and demonstrates that what the collection calls 'the rhythms of poiesis and this place' are those of human life in general. Middleton's contributions to American poetry cannot be doubted."" --Catharine Savage Brosman ""David Middleton commands contemporary poetry with a Proustian imagination, and he is surely one of Mnemosyne's brightest descendants making poems in the world today. In The Fiddler of Driskill Hill this master poet reminds us that remembering still can be a sacred act, that each thing we call a poem is a sacred vessel, and that the poet descended into mindful remembering acquires a voice that is itself descended from the sacred. The Fiddler of Driskill Hill expands history and love poem and hymn to include the experiences and the memories of a poet who knows the music of the line and the song the poem is a few other working poets do."" --Darrell Bourque ""Except for David Middleton, I can name no other contemporary poet whose work I would choose to describe as stately. In his case, this rare quality is achieved through technical mastery, devoted labor, judicious sympathy, and loving contemplation. The Fiddler of Driskill Hill is the best work to date, a splendid achievement in its every aspect. There is variety in plenty in the pages - speakers and stories from times past and present, folktales, tributes to personages who do not often receive tributes - but this variety is made harmonious by the power of a vision both equable and passionate. Here is poetry for the ages."" --Fred Chappell Praise for The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy ""A powerful representation, in the music of vowels and consonants, of Millet's work . . . A major and memorable accomplishment."" --George Garrett ""A highly original and beautiful poetic sequence that translates into verbal terms not merely Millet's nineteenth-century would but the art itself, its lighting and shaping, its vision."" --Catharine Savage Brosman ""Middleton's empathies seem almost commensurate with those of the great painter and this book of poems, read alone or in companionship with the art, sounds a music that seems to rise from the earth that Millet embraced."" --Fred Chappell ""Both Millet's art and Middleton's poetry are immensely enriched by the intermingling of the two sensibilities. It is a remarkable experience to share this deliberate immersion in the sensibility of another, and a masterly achievement of Middleton's art."" --Helen Pinkerton Trimpi ""My favorite ekphrastic poems . . . Middleton usually begins with descriptions of [Jean-François Millet's] paintings, moving from foreground to background or from background to foreground, drawing our attention to significant yet easily missed details. From there he proceeds, often in the third or fourth stanzas, to possible allusions and to thematic reflections. . . . Middleton's poems helped me not only think about these paintings . . . in a deeper way. They helped me think feelingly about them. They drew me into a contemplative mood."" --Dappled Things, Steven Knepper Praise for David Middleton ""What has long intrigued me about Middleton's work as a poet is how humble it is regarding its own authority. The poems make their agrarian indictments of modernity. They look with reverence on the South's past, even as they confess its sins and know the resultant condition has proven tragic. They relish the possibility of verse to speak clearly and in an elevated but natural diction in iambic measures . . . Now, as that work approaches its end, it is time to discover the major poet who has lived among us, surveying the natural and spiritual terrain of the cosmos within the sacramental, flowering figure of Louisiana."" --The Catholic World Report, James Matthew Wilson ""David Middleton provides a novice with an excellent means of learning to read contemporary poetry. The meaning of his verse is not obscured by tortuous syntax, esoteric diction, or erudite allusion. He does not dazzle his reader with figurative pyrotechnics or lavishly contrived labyrinths of imagery. As a result, his work may appear deceptively simple . . . But read again, and yet again, and the rhythm and the verbal music of the verse will reveal more and more the beauty and subtlety of his carefully modulated language."" --Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, R. V. Young
Praise for Beyond the Chandeleurs ""Pervaded by a profound Christian sensibility and controlled by a highly disciplined respect for the poetic craft, the poems in Beyond the Chandeleurs are a series of remarkably evocative meditations on the mystery of God revealed to the poet in his relationships with persons, contemporary and historical--his parents, his grandparents, a Sunday school teacher, the yeoman farmers of north Louisiana; in his experience of places and events--visiting Oak Alley Plantation, studying the battle of Franklin, Tennessee, in 1864, making a journey to appear at a literary conference; and in his experience of the natural world and its creatures as they exist in his native Louisiana--'Azaleas in Epiphany, ' 'Blue Herons, ' 'Beyond the Chandeleurs.' A celebration of the reality of the mystery of God in the face of the amorality of the 'post-Christian age, ' Beyond the Chandeleurs may appropriately be called the work of a latter-day psalmist."" --Lewis P. Simpson ""David Middleton's powerful poetic imagination, rooted in Louisiana's history and its soils and waters--small towns, tilled fields, piney woods, hardwood forests, swamps, bayous--evokes familiar, circumscribed human dramas of love, joy, illness, and death in their social and natural settings, and at the same time reaches out to read the eloquent testimony of the stars, as they bear witness to the divine, universal Presence. His broad, sympathetic vision and the sense of order it implies are supported throughout by his seasoned command of formal verse. This new collection makes it clear that Middleton is among the most accomplished of southern poets now writing and the preeminent voice of Louisiana in verse today."" --Catharine Savage Brosman ""Bravely and independently, David Middleton walks his own way, making poems of great clarity and distinction, poems rooted in his faith, his sense of history, and his love for people and the natural world. Beyond the Chandeleurs proves him a poet of increasing depth and heightening stature. Readers will cherish his work, provided they care for tradition, accomplished music, and formal excellence."" --X. J. Kennedy ""David Middleton's densely wrought poetry demands the kind of close attention that most poets of our time do not ask. He rewards such attention with an original perspective and a searching meditative exploration of contemporary experience. He has sought to be among the 'seekers who would bring to what they find / A loving objectivity of mind.' His loving objectivity makes his poetry a unique and compelling achievement."" --Helen Trimpi Praise for The Fiddler of Driskill Hill ""'To be national in literature, ' wrote William Gilmore Simms, 'one must needs be sectional.' Middleton's finely crafted, almost classical poems, grounded in the English poetic tradition, allow him to 'defend and illustrate' the genius loci of Louisiana in its human and topographical variety and its deep historical and cultural meaning. Through this close attention to people, locales, and seasons, his writing underlines broad truths and demonstrates that what the collection calls 'the rhythms of poiesis and this place' are those of human life in general. Middleton's contributions to American poetry cannot be doubted."" --Catharine Savage Brosman ""David Middleton commands contemporary poetry with a Proustian imagination, and he is surely one of Mnemosyne's brightest descendants making poems in the world today. In The Fiddler of Driskill Hill this master poet reminds us that remembering still can be a sacred act, that each thing we call a poem is a sacred vessel, and that the poet descended into mindful remembering acquires a voice that is itself descended from the sacred. The Fiddler of Driskill Hill expands history and love poem and hymn to include the experiences and the memories of a poet who knows the music of the line and the song of the poem as few other working poets do."" --Darrell Bourque ""Except for David Middleton, I can name no other contemporary poet whose work I would choose to describe as stately. In his case, this rare quality is achieved through technical mastery, devoted labor, judicious sympathy, and loving contemplation. The Fiddler of Driskill Hill is the best work to date, a splendid achievement in its every aspect. There is variety in plenty in the pages - speakers and stories from times past and present, folktales, tributes to personages who do not often receive tributes - but this variety is made harmonious by the power of a vision both equable and passionate. Here is poetry for the ages."" --Fred Chappell Praise for The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy ""A powerful representation, in the music of vowels and consonants, of Millet's work . . . A major and memorable accomplishment."" --George Garrett ""A highly original and beautiful poetic sequence that translates into verbal terms not merely Millet's nineteenth-century world but the art itself, its lighting and shaping, its vision."" --Catharine Savage Brosman ""Middleton's empathies seem almost commensurate with those of the great painter and this book of poems, read alone or in companionship with the art, sounds a music that seems to rise from the earth that Millet embraced."" --Fred Chappell ""Both Millet's art and Middleton's poetry are immensely enriched by the intermingling of the two sensibilities. It is a remarkable experience to share this deliberate immersion in the sensibility of another, and a masterly achievement of Middleton's art."" --Helen Pinkerton Trimpi ""My favorite ekphrastic poems . . . Middleton usually begins with descriptions of [Jean-François Millet's] paintings, moving from foreground to background or from background to foreground, drawing our attention to significant yet easily missed details. From there he proceeds, often in the third or fourth stanzas, to possible allusions and to thematic reflections. . . . Middleton's poems helped me not only think about these paintings . . . in a deeper way. They helped me think feelingly about them. They drew me into a contemplative mood."" --Dappled Things, Steven Knepper Praise for Outside the Gates of Eden ""For several decades early in the last century, the writers of the American South published some of our most important literature--works of religious seriousness, historical scope, traditional reverence, moral reckoning, and formal dexterity. The heirs to such achievements have been few. David Middleton is one of the best among them. In his few but distinguished books, he has again and again brought us poems where the profound beauty of meter joins with the high themes of human life, where rootedness in place is joined with metaphysical vision. He is surely one of the finest living poets of the American South and a poet destined long to be read by everyone with an ear for music and an eye for classical precision."" --James Matthew Wilson ""David Middleton develops in this new volume major panels of his vision. Announced by his title, the Judeo-Christian tradition underpins the whole. Among other sources of inspiration are the classics, nature, great Southern figures, and twentieth-century rural and small-town South, treated with deep reverence and sentiment. Graphic art, one of Middleton's longtime concerns, provides material for many fine poems, generally ekphrastic and based on work by Poussin, Constable, and Millet. Fittingly, death must occupy a place. ""The Potter's Epitaph"" joins the two themes, death and art, strikingly. The poet's moving word-pictures illustrate his sweeping vision, pastoral but, of necessity, reflecting the flawed human condition, broken after Eden."" --Catharine Savage Brosman ""In the time and distance between Grecian lindens and Louisiana oaks, there are few gates that David Middleton cannot peer through in his search for meaning in the poetry of earthly life, with its mythologies, histories, paintings, fellow poets, and landscapes. His observations in Outside the Gates of Eden are told and revealed with the highest poetic craft and art."" --John P. Doucet ""These beautifully structured poems show . . . contrasts between life now and that of the once-perfect Eden. All are elegant, stately, and carefully constructed. Middleton's well-chiseled poetry, centered on what 'Eden' means, captures brilliantly many elements of life--its challenges, loves, austerities, and wisdom--in such a way that clearly elevates Middleton to the position of one of the most important American poets alive today."" --Olivia Pass ""Vibrating with the fathomless question of human being, these poems pay homage to all that mends our minds and souls as we wander the world, exiles of an ever-remembered Eden. Erudite without being oblique, written in measures and yet bursting with primordial verve, Middleton's verse partakes of the great, centuries-old conversation while wrestling new yields from its words and the Word."" --Joshua Hren ""At once quietly perceptive and cosmically directed, Middleton's poems unfold the ontologic mystery of existence, even as they remind us of God's immediacy in our revealed creation."" --Dappled Things, Emma Mason Praise for The Burning Fields ""The Burning Fields has recovered for us the unfailing poetic theme, God and the mysteries of his creation. Fire destroys, but burning sugarcane stalks makes way for another crop and life. There is little abstract language here. Middleton's muse repeats in high clarity and blood feeling those cooperating opposites by means of which we display God's secret intentions. Quite properly this poet's Christian world is placed not in the Copernican but in the Ptolemaic order. David Middleton's poetry is a fresh and authoritative southern voice."" --Andrew Lytle ""I have known and admired the poetry of David Middleton for close to fifteen years. His theme is the recovery from the subjective mind. The recovery takes the form of orthodoxy in religion and traditional forms in literature, but these forms are not mere repetitions of the past. They are means by which Middleton can sharpen and illuminate his experience. Middleton does not believe in formalism for the sake of formalism. He adds a new edge to the leaf. He is one of the most important poets to come out of the South, or anywhere else for that matter."" --John Finlay Praise for David Middleton ""What has long intrigued me about Middleton's work as a poet is how humble it is regarding its own authority. The poems make their agrarian indictments of modernity. They look with reverence on the South's past, even as they confess its sins and know the resultant condition has proven tragic. They relish the possibility of verse to speak clearly and in an elevated but natural diction in iambic measures . . . Now, as that work approaches its end, it is time to discover the major poet who has lived among us, surveying the natural and spiritual terrain of the cosmos within the sacramental, flowering figure of Louisiana."" --The Catholic World Report, James Matthew Wilson ""David Middleton provides a novice with an excellent means of learning to read contemporary poetry. The meaning of his verse is not obscured by tortuous syntax, esoteric diction, or erudite allusion. He does not dazzle his reader with figurative pyrotechnics or lavishly contrived labyrinths of imagery. As a result, his work may appear deceptively simple . . . But read again, and yet again, and the rhythm and the verbal music of the verse will reveal more and more the beauty and subtlety of his carefully modulated language."" --Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, R. V. Young
