If someone barefoot stood in a saloon,
    His dromedary might be chomping outside,
    That majestic meal. High olive notes
    Plucked from a mandolin. Fumes. Leafgreen.

    A dark descends. There, with banana palm,
    Consorts forbidden music. Ugly. Ocean.
    Delay it.

from 'Saloon with Birds'

Intimate Chronicles is in three parts. In the first, against a background of destruction in history and of history, figures take shape. The second section contains poems about various art works as durable epiphanies. Poems in the third section work around figures that signify resistance, in large ways or small, to destruction, and endurance through it. Various historical periods are sighted or glimpsed through a personal lens and in a shifting perspective: those of a person now captive, now free. Each section centres on transformation, metamorphosis, Middleton's perennial theme. The poems can be read as miniatures that refract and enact moments of transformation in an imagination awake to larger, more gradual, encompassing transformations. It is they that, historically measured or figuring as cosmic events, erupt in the instant of speech and, more precisely, in the fragile and eccentric instrumentation of speech to which poetry aspires.