Description
For many years Mike Doyle has been crafting poems of dense meditative beauty. By cutting a path down the middle of the extremes of modern tradtitions, he has created a poetry that is at once intellectually precise and imaginatively alert to the immediate.
About the author
Like most poets whose work began so far back, my earlier poems are more obviously formal than later ones. Although I took pains at a certain stage to loosen these forms and even escape from them, as I look back I rejoice in them, glad I was there for it to happen. Then, many later poems are formal in a more covert fashion, and that too I rejoice in. It took me a long while to ‘grow up’ as a poet, but since that happened, and gratifyingly often before it happened, what tends to characterize my poems is momentum, a kind of momentum in which the experience of the poem is very present even though its material and/or subject may be memory. An earlier poet saw the poem as ‘a slice of life seen through a temperament’. That seems right, if one adds that surprisingly often there is a mysterious element in the perception. From the Foreword by Mike DoyleMike Doyle is a poet, critic, biographer and editor. His other work includes William Carlos Williams and the American Poem (1982), Richard Aldington: A Biography (1989), Paper Trombones (2007), a journal of his life as a poet in Canada, and Intimate Absences (1993), a “Selected Poems” from work up to that date. He has also published critical essays on Williams, Wallace Stevens, H.D., Irving Layton, Al Purdy and others. He has received a UNESCO Creative Artist’s Fellowship, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, a Jessie Mackay (PEN) Award for Poetry. He wrote his book on Williams while a Research Fellow of American Studies at Yale University.
Other titles by
Cutting Knots
The Later Years
The Drifting Archipelago
Floating Islands
A Writer's Early Life
Riding the Pig
More Notes on Poetics
Echoes from Pluto
Poems 2009-2013
Softwood Trumpets
Collected Poems 1951-2009
The Watchman's Dance
Poems 2004-2009
Paper Trombones
Notes on Poetics
Where to Begin
the selected Letters of Mike Doyle and Cid Corman