In Mike Doyle’s most recent book, The Watchman’s Dance: Poems 2004-2009, we are offered new poems of rigorous beauty, in careful lines that are at once lucid and subtle, cosmopolitan and possessing a casual forthrightness, formally serene and full of moral passion, distinguished by a quiet intimiacy and an intellectual precision. These poems find their centre where memories, places, and visions intersect. Mike Doyle is one our more significant poets, and all he chooses to tell is told so quietly one marvels at the transparency of his art, as the complexity, variety, and depth of his work are presented in deceptively simple and disarmingly open contemplative poetry. The Watchman’s Dance is an urgent and imaginitively vigorous book, perhaps his most accessible, mysterious and immediately beautiful book.

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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