The Burning Fields: Poems - Hardcover

Middleton, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807116386 ISBN 13: 9780807116388

Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr, 1991

Synopsis

Poems discuss themes of life in the South, traditional values, family relationships, and classical learning

About this title

Review

The Abandoned Manor
Blue Essences: The 1890s
The Buried Life
The Burning Fields
Chiron On Asclepius 1. Nativity
Chiron On Asclepius 2. A School Of Medicine
Chiron On Asclepius 3. Memoir
Chiron The Headmaster
The Cliffs Of Epidauros
The Conversion Of Wallace Stevens
The Death Of Chiron
Elegy For A Father
Emerson At Belsen
Epiphany In Baca
The Family Tree
For A Needlewoman
Four Poems From Hesiod In Old Age: Catalogue
Four Poems From Hesiod In Old Age: Contest
Four Poems From Hesiod In Old Age: Genealogy
Four Poems From Hesiod In Old Age: The Visitation
The Gentleman Scholar
The Journeying Moon
Lines For The Dormition Of The Virgin
The Maker In Lent
Mallarme Over Hiroshima
The Middle World 1. The Craft Of Noah
The Middle World 2. Elegy On The Ploughmen Of The Stars
The Middle World 3. Dominion: A Pastoral
The Middle World 4. Advents Of Evening
The Middle World 5. The Covenant
The Miscarriage
The Naming Of The Trees: Odysseus To Laertes
October Oaks
The Old Guard's Coronach
The Old Man's Flowers
On The Suicide Of The Chairman Of The Math Department
The Patriarch
The Planters 1.
The Planters 2.
The Planters 3.
The Planters 4.
The Planters 5.
Provincial Letter
The Quiet Garden
The Shepherd
The Stoic
Thomas Tallis To William Byrd
To The Platonic One
Two For Taliessin 1. Taliessin's Apostrophe To Arthur
Two For Taliessin 2. Taliessin On The Embarkation Of Arthur
The Vision
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

From Publishers Weekly

In his first collection, Middleton pays poetic tribute to various family members and friends, several from his Louisiana boyhood, all of whom have had a profound impact on his life. To his maternal grandmother, he writes, "You were the angel summoned up in pain / that innocence might walk upon the earth's / Envisioned ground." In other poems, Middleton reinterprets classical and Christian myths, depicting, in the process, a "middle world" between the materialism of nature and the metaphysicality of heaven, a somewhat idealistic state of being steeped in traditional moral values and a trenchant religious faith. Overseeing this world, of course, is God, who created men and women so that "from them may emerge, and we behold, / Beyond the end of everything on earth, / Old Plato's ghostly orders of the soul." These poems, painstakingly fashioned to meet certain requirements of rhyme and meter, are often constrained by the formalism of Middleton's technical prowess. In addition, there is an aloof moral and intellectual pretentiousness about his work that severely limits any emotional or spiritual connection between reader and poet.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0807116386
• ISBN 13: 9780807116388
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 60