At the beginning of his newest book of poems, “The Fiddler of Driskill Hill,” poet David Middleton tells his readers that he and his companions “give ourselves to what we had possessed / Too rudely in the day.”
This line contains two of the major themes or atmospheres in Middleton’s new work: the darkness of night and old age that shadow almost every poem in this collection; reflection and recollection –– all of the “re-” words that force us to go ever back into our pas and our minds.
This line combines the two ideas neatly in a way that Middleton considers crucial: something about the darkness halts all human activity, making reflection only possible at night and recollection only wise with age. Yet Middleton settles comfortably into this somewhat unsettling duality of death and knowledge, setting the majority of his poems at night during fall or winter — hence the first, atmospheric line of “Bonfires on the Levee,” the first poem in the collection “Late autumn days we labor in the swamp.”
This poem, in its relatively programmatic opening, also shows another key element of Middleton’s purpose: the richness of place — for Middleton, his native Louisiana, after which “nothing seemed real,” according to “Warren in Thibodaux.”
Middleton himself lives in Thibodaux and sets most of his poems there, though, in the course of reading “The Fiddler of Driskill Hill,” the reader travels throughout Louisiana, guided by references in the text or by prefatory lines before the text of the poem. These bits of context serve readers well, allowing them to approach the poem from something like Middleton’s mind. However, this brings up one criticism: that few of Middleton’s readers know Louisiana as well as he does, but he sometimes speaks as though they should. This causes the reader to be confused by some of his contextual prefaces and makes some poems (such as significant portions of “Bonfires on the Levee”) set readers’ head awhirl with geography and leave them looking for a map of Louisiana.
A map, in fact, would be an excellent addition to Middleton’s next collection. In spite of the reader’s occasional geographic woes, Middleton does an excellent job of exemplifying how to live “not . . . within the state / But in an unabstracted known domain,” as he says in “Black Lake Tales.” In general, Middleton achieves the high goal he speaks of in “Before and After Reading,” when he talks of creating a “Community of grounds and sounds ground fine,” but at times readers may finds the foreign geography prevents them from participating in Middleton’s Louisiana, and they can only imitate Middleton’s love for place — by no means an easy task.
Technically, Middleton displays great facility, moving from tight to loose meters and through various rhymed and blank forms with ease. His metrical prowess ranges from artfully used basics — an iambic inversion in “Hand-Me-Downs” shows the reader how “Her husband far afield pushes a plow,”— to lines of brilliance that can’t be pinned down but somehow sound perfect. Occasionally a strange word choice or confusing syntax (often due to lacking punctuation) will puzzle the readers in the middle of a poem, but more often the readers will linger over a richly meaningful word or intriguingly ambiguous word order. Even the one or two poems that are less thematically meaningful still sparkle with word-play and artistry.
Middleton, with his love of darkness, is likewise a friend of enigma and often leads the readers on with a few simple stanzas only to complicate the poem deeply in the last stanza or last line. Yet for all his dark and cloudy sayings and focus on the night, Middleton always holds the morning as his goal. The cover illustration is, after all, a sunrise.
Middleton’s darkness, and therein his recollection, always serves his light, for he never leaves his readers in the shadows. He desires to come to grips with the darkness, to linger there, engaging with the memories that dwell only in night, so that he may eventually bring us into the day: as the closing image of his book, Middleton draws himself, the poet, fiddling at midnight to bring the sunrise into being.
David Middleton is a masterful poet and “The Fiddler of Driskill Hil” a masterful collection well worth the time of any lover of poetry, place, darkness, and the dawn.
tvalle@hillsdale.edu
