Outside the Gates of Eden

A review by Steven Knepper of David Middleton’s fifth poetry collection from Measure Press, 2023.

David Middleton’s fifth full-length poetry collection begins in New Orleans’s Audubon Zoo, where a night guard patrols the exhibits, watches over the animals, thinks of the children who will visit them the next day, and guards against thieves who might infiltrate the zoo and carry away animals for the black market in exotics, “who provide / Stolen calves and cubs to the roadside zoos / Where they will languish, maddened in their cells, / Or offer them as curios to those / So rich and bored they need menageries.” A later poem takes us to the Louisiana State Fair in Shreveport, where “everywhere thrill after thrill draws crowds, / The Teacups spinning and the Tilt-A-Whirl, / Bumper Cars, the Wipeout, and the Whip, / The Wild Mouse with its unbanked hairpin curves.” 

Shreveport-born, Middleton had a rich childhood split between the city and the rural environs of his grandparents. His father was a painter, which formed his way of seeing the world and his artistic sensibilities. While his artistic vocation was ultimately in poetry, Middleton has a painter’s eye and often writes about paintings.  Middleton earned his PhD from LSU’s English Department, where he studied with the scholar, formalist poet, and Southern Review editor Donald E. Stanford, and where he wrote a comprehensive commentary on the poems of Dylan Thomas for his dissertation. Middleton went on to a long teaching career at Louisiana’s Nicholls State University, where he remains as Poet in Residence Emeritus. 

The poems in Outside the Gates of Eden range widely in time and place, in myth and history. Poems recount Odysseus’s return to Ithaca and Odin’s visit to Mimir’s well. They range from the Greek Pytheas’s northward voyage of discovery, seeking “the final limit of the world,” to the Civil War Battle of Cold Harbor and the deadly aerial combat of World War I. Several poems are quietly insightful ekphrastic meditations on the paintings of John Constable, Nicolas Poussin, and especially Jean-François Millet, whose art was the focus of Middleton’s third poetry collection The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy. Yet Middleton returns again and again to his home state, taking readers of Outside the Gates of Eden from New Orleans and Shreveport to Thibodaux and Baton Rouge, from northern Louisiana to southern, from big cities to farms and small towns like Saline, of Bienville Parish, where Middleton spent boyhood summers with his maternal grandparents. Middleton catalogs Louisiana’s animals and plants, its landscapes and natural history, its places and people. 

Middleton is one of the most accomplished formalist poets writing today, but his life in poetry has not only been devoted to his own verse. He has been a committed teacher and critic (see his sonnet “The Scholar” in this collection), and he has also shown steadfast literary friendship by helping to secure the legacy of two other poets who died too soon. Middleton has written several essays on the work of Wilmer Mills, who grew up on a Louisiana farm and had established himself as a skilled lyricist and narrative poet before dying from cancer at the age of 41 in 2011. Middleton is also the literary executor of his graduate school friend and fellow poet John Martin Finlay, an Alabama-born Catholic convert who died from AIDS in 1991. Recently, Middleton oversaw the publication of Finlay’s collected poems and collected essays for Wiseblood Books. Finlay is a major presence in Outside the Gates, as both the subject of poems and the provider of epigraphs. The collection’s final poem, by turns humorous, inspiring, and moving, recounts a break-in at Finlay’s Baton Rouge apartment, where the thieves left empty-handed and undoubtedly frustrated because they found only the books and scribbled drafts of a poor and focused writer. 

Outside the Gates of Eden ends with a brief prose essay, “The Striking of the Lyre: Demodokos in Modernity.” In it, Middleton lays out his sense of the poet’s vocation. The poet should offer insight into the complexities and mysteries of the human person. Middleton takes his bearings here from the scene in the Odyssey where disguised Odysseus is brought to tears by the poet Demodokos’s verse recounting of the Trojan War. The poet should also be animated by what Denise Levertov, whose poetry was quite different from Middleton’s but who shared this sense of vocation, called “primary wonder,” the wonder that, in Middleton’s words, “there [is] a universe instead of nothing” and that it is “as it is and not otherwise.” Here Middleton, a Christian poet, takes his bearings from the opening chapters of Genesis, from the Eden evoked in his collection’s title and in many of its poems, and especially “the story of Adam the Namer, who spoke to the answering beasts before the Fall, and the story of the Fall itself as involving disruption—not only between human beings and the other creatures and between language and things but even between words and the very Word itself.” While not denying that disruption, while facing up to the Fall, the poet must also, in Middleton’s understanding of the ancient vocation, seek out wonder words that at least resonate, perhaps even rhyme, with the Word. While Middleton lays this out in his closing prose essay, he introduces it in the collection’s opening poem about the zoo’s night watchman, who as speaker of the poem is a poet himself and keeper of a kind of garden, and who is the “heir” of neither Noah nor David so much as “[o]f Adam who tamed animals with names, / Addressing them in ur-speech, early words, / The owl’s prime Eden screech for colloquy.” 

Middleton’s catalogs of plants and animals and landscapes are thus also litanies, exact in observation and limned in wonder. One of my favorite poems in this collection, “Calling Down the Birds,” is written in memory of Caroline Dormon, a naturalist whom Middleton visited in his childhood and who was an early mentor in this vocation as poet. Hence, the opening stanza:

You saw them just the way they really were,

Those flowers in your gardens and the wild,

Studied, preserved, in earth and paint and words,

The naturalist and artist of one mind.

There is no shortage of fallenness in Middleton’s poetry. His intricate mastery of meter and rhyme attests to the wonder that the world presents itself in pattern and order.  (This wonder becomes explicit in a poem like “Before and After Sleep”: “The spiraling florets of flower heads, / The curve of shell and beak, of horn and claw, / The whirling squares a logarithm spreads / Through everything by Fibonacci’s law.”).  Middleton’s use of meter at the same time allows for tensions when his consummate verse describes the violent and the horrific. It can thus suggest the problem—or, better, mystery—of evil at even the most basic level of form. Yet Middleton never loses the more affirmative side of his vocation. He is always searching for those glimmers of Eden, those momentary glimpses through its barred gates, as when Caroline Dormon reaches out seed-filled hands and the wild birds alight on her arms: “A kingdom needing peace, a saving grace, / A mixed flock growing larger by your love, / Still trusting that first promise you had made.” 

Steven Knepper, Ph.D., is a Professor of English at Virginia Military Institute, and is a widely published poet and the founding editor of New Verse Review. He has written or edited several books at the intersection of literature, religion, and philosophy. To learn more about Steven’s work, visit his website: stevenknepper.com.

David Middleton is the author of Outside the Gates of Eden, which was published by Measure Press Inc. in 2023. To purchase this poetry collection, click here.