Mike Doyle, a poet of considerable range and depth, offers an unassailable argument for experience and impassioned observation with the publication of his Collected Poems 1951-2009. Neither easily classified nor directly traceable to a particular school or lineage, he stands instead within his own continuously evolving context, as free of convention and fashion as he is independent of thought outside the work itself. Doyle’s poetry has been innovative, eclectic and exploratory, and Collected Poems now offers access to the realized body of his work. He believes in Paul Valery’s dictum that poems come from moments or episodes of psychic tension followed by the hard work of extrapolation and composition. He began writing poems regularly while still at school in London, England, during World War Two. In January 1951 he was drafted to New Zealand for naval service, and, remaining in New Zealand eighteen years, he had the good fortune to find himself in a community of writers in Wellington in the 1950s. His first poetry collection, A Splinter of Glass (1956), was awarded an UNESCO Creative Artist’s Fellowship which brought him to the United States, his work falling briefly under the influence of Creeley and Duncan. In 1968 he and his family moved to British Columbia, where he began teaching at the University of Victoria. Earth Meditations was published in 1971 by Coach House Press; but after that, reassessing his stance as a poet, Doyle decided to concentrate on what Matthew Arnold called ‘felt life’ and on the range of technical possibilities in poetry. This approach, involving a determination to be open and eclectic, has defined the nature of his work ever since. This volume contains a generous selection of his poetry from all his published collections, up to his latest published book, The Watchman’s Dance. It also contains several uncollected poems, coming from every period of Doyle’s career. With or without the new poems, Doyle is a major writer who has contributed to the literature of three continents over six decades. This is the most complete collection of his poetry and it will become an essential addition to both academic and public libraries, as well as to the libraries of all readers of 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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