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With Riding the Pig, the third volume in the author’s autobiographical “notes on poetics” series, Mike Doyle celebrates his 70th year in literature. Doyle’s taste, rooted in the twin pillars of Yeats and Williams, has always been eclectic, his interests ranging from East European masters to French symbolists to Latin American poetry. Doyle has always hewn his own path, however, and in this volume, he renders sharp consideration of his contemporaries such as Robin Skelton, P.K. Page, and others, as well as a balanced assessment of writers who resonate deeply, such as Katherine Mansfield, Richard Aldington, H.D., Karl Stead and Basil Bunting. Riding the Pig is a personal book — challenging, often contrarian, but sustaining a firm commitment to poetry.
Mike 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) and its follow-up Softwood Trumpets (2012), 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, and a Jessie Mackay (PEN) Award for Poetry. He wrote his book on Williams while a visiting Research Fellow of American Studies at Yale University. Doyle has lived in Victoria for over forty years and is a Canadian citizen of long standing. | |