Outside the Gates of Eden is a carefully sequenced collection of poems whose deepest roots are in the opening words and chapters of the Book of Genesis: How God, by simply speaking, brought things into existence; how Adam further linked mankind to creation by naming the animals; how Adam and Eve fell from a state of innocence and perfection into this world of history, death, and time - whose effects some poems depict; and how art, especially poetry with its use of linking metaphors, has a special - even heroic - role as a mode of knowing by which human beings can once again perceive and, perhaps, even move toward the wholeness, harmony, and radiance of what "Eden" means.

In addition, this collection considers how poetry may be the way by which humankind can most fully celebrate, here and now, even in a post-Edenic world, the mystery of creation, its orderliness and beauty, its origin and end, its purposefulness, and, above all, the wonder of its merely being. Traces of the old geocentric Ptolemaic cosmos and its music of the spheres are here and there in this verse still faintly apprehended.