Time Will Tell: Collected Poems of David Middleton

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 Paradise
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Middleton’s previously published works*, Time Will Tell includes 50 years of selected, new, uncollected, and previously unpublished poems, written 1973-2023.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, 2023).

DAVID MIDDLETON is Poet in Residence Emeritus at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana. Middleton’s books of verse include The Burning Fields (1991), Beyond the Chandeleurs (1999), The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy: Poems After Pictures by Jean-François Millet (2005), The Fiddler of Driskill Hill (2013); and Outside the Gates of Eden (2023). Middleton’s poems have appeared in The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review, and elsewhere. Middleton won The Allen Tate Poetry Prize at The Sewanee Review in 2005. Middleton has served as poetry editor for three national quarterlies and is the literary executor for Alabama poet John Martin Finlay.