On December 28th 2016, in Victoria B.C., Mike Doyle, poet, critic, biographer, and father, departed this earth, but not before he could finish Cutting Knots, the final volume in his series of memoirs. Here Mike charts his life in a new and strange century, beginning with a final voyage to his beloved Ireland in 2002 and concluding with the publication of Echoes from Pluto, his last book of verse. Although Mike’s body slows over the years (or “cuts knots,” as he has it), his mind remains as lively and adventurous as ever. He offers us penetrating insights into books and films alongside ruminations about everything from mortality to baseball. Cutting Knots is an engaging farewell from a man who loved language and life itself until the very end.

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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