The second volume of Doyle’s trilogy of memoirs that began with Floating Islands (2015), The Drifting Archipelago covers his life from his arrival on Vancouver Island in 1968 to the demise of his third marriage at the end of the century. In it, Doyle discusses his progress as a poet and his at times uneasy relationship with the Canadian literary scene. In the book’s last line, he mentions “the exhilaration of being alone.” Much of the preceding volume deals with Doyle’s complex relationships with others, and his adventures as a professor, activist, husband, and father. Sounds, textures, taswtes colours trajectories and intimations are gathered with a poet’s intelligence to convey a vivid and illuminating record of his life and times, as the author drifts from island to island. The third volume in the series of memoirs, Cutting Knots, sent to the publisher by Mike Doyle a week before his death, will be forthcoming. The Drifting Archipelago offers a vivid and lyrical presentation of a full and extraordinary life.

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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