In Paper Trombones poet and scholar Mike Doyle shares musings on poetry - his own and others' - drawn from informal journal notes of the past thirty years. Born in London of Irish descent, Doyle lived in New Zealand before moving to Victoria, BC. As a poet and academic on three continents, Doyle recalls fascinating encounters with prominent literary figures - from Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath to Basil Bunting, Anne Sexton, Robert Creeley, James Wright, Robert Bly, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, George Woodcock and various Canadian poets. With candid commentary on his wide reading in poetry, philosophy and criticism, Mike Doyle is a personable guide to the currents of contemporary literature. Pound, Williams, Stevens, Modernism and the language and Black Mountain schools, are discussed, as well as Keats, Coleridge and Hardy, both in terms of the writing and the effect on Doyle’s poems. An accessible journey through a personal landscape of poetry, Paper Trombones will appeal to those interested in the art of poetry and the dialogue on contemporary literature. The volume also includes some out of print poems mentioned in the notes.

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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