David Middleton's THE HABITUAL PEACEFULNESS OF GRUCHY should be read by every poet. I read this book of poetry traveling by train from London and could not have had a better companion. The oblique afternoon light of early spring set just the right ambient through the window as the triple landscape passed by: that viewed through the train window, that internal one from Middleton's exquisite poetic ekphrases and Millet's remembered original scenes set in a similar light. This is mature poetry of the most crafted art where not a word is out of place. In Arcadian subtlety reminding me of the Idylls of Theocritus but with a profound sense of calm, like the Barbizon milieu the painter Millet evoked in his work, Middleton's poems quietly establish nature as a Muse not indifferent to her children, whether they they be cowherds or farmgirls with geese or the animals themselves, all very much tied to a rich earth under a humbling broad sky. All of Middleton's poems have a loveliness in the last few lines full of reflective climax and sheer delight of surprise. One of my favorite poems in this book, "Faggot Gatherers on the Edge of Fontainbleau Forest", ends with a note on a miracle of Christ, seeing the men carrying heavy loads of sticks on bent backs: "Not as mere subjects for his craft but souls / Bearing the common burdens of this earth / He thought of one whose eyes, when half-repaired / By miracle, had seen men walk like trees." How could the climax of a poem be better than this, connecting without fanfare to the miraculous in the last lines ? This kind of elevation is rarely experienced in poetry. I am recommending this gem of a book to all my students.