Of the Mortal Fire: Poems 1999-2002

Caroline Kizer, Pulitzer Prize winner and former director of the literary section of the National Endowment for the Arts, has stated: "I believe Middleton is the finest living poet writing in English. If this were a just world, he would have the Nobel Prize." Guy Davenport writes that his "rare genius for exact observation and metaphysical wit as given us for over half a century now poems of such brilliant craftsmanship and exacting sensibility that a few critics only have dared to assess their magic. He is an incomparable stylist, a wry ironist, a philosopher of words." These new poems continue Middleton’s exploration of geography, imagination, and "trouble about history."