Christopher Middleton is a poet for our moment: angry, denunciatory, fed up with the status quo. But he’s not a young Occupier or Tea Party supporter. Middleton is an eighty-five-year-old Englishman living in Texas, and his most recent volume, A Company of Ghosts, is approximately his twenty-fourth book of poems. (Sometimes he publishes poetry and prose in the same volume, or publishes translations of other writers’ work alongside his own.) Middleton is a master of distinctly adult anger, free of clamor or whine, and the steady flame of it flares up repeatedly in A Company of Ghosts.

While