In Softwood Trumpets, poet and scholar Mike Doyle continues his “notes on poets and poetics” shared in a previous volume, Paper Trombones. Taking off where the earlier volume ends, Softwood Trumpets serves as a chronicle of Doyle’s daily meditations on poetry. Whether discussing great figures of the past or his contemporaries in the local and national literary community, the poet records impressions that are deeply referential, but never reverential. Born and raised in England, from an Irish family, Doyle later moved to New Zealand and then spent the last 45 years in Victoria, BC where he taught literature at the University of Victoria. As both an insider and an outsider, he is uniquely positioned to make wide and uncompromising observations. Doyle’s perspicacity is restrained by a wry and unassuming intelligence, suggesting a reserved, postmodern Samuel Pepys adrift in the garden paradise of Victoria. Softwood Trumpets is an illuminating commentary on books and people, in which Mike Doyle probes the meaning of a life lived through poetry.

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.

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