Echoes from Pluto is the first new collection from celebrated senior poet Mike Doyle since his substantial Collected Poems. Doyle gathers together a selection of his most recent poems, presenting lyrics, shorter and longer narrative poems, comic meditations and reflections on the natural world. Over his prolific and celebrated writing career, he has been one of the most rigorous and inventive technicians. His poetry ranges, like jazz improvisation, from restrained observation to spontatious flashes of insight, from sublime complexity to elegant understatement. Echoes from Pluto is alive with clear-eyed conviction and the cultural responsibility of the poet.

Repeated themes and poems of memory…giving it the coherence of a single personality. It’s an engaging one, open, fluent, generally accessible. As a poet who is also a critic and teacher, he is watchful over his own behaviour, literary and otherwise, and alert to the pervasive mood and particular detail of the world around. (New Zealand Books, winter 2011)

The Collected Poems will interest critics concerned with the recent history of Canadian poetry and with what used to be known as Commonwealth literature. But this rich book is more than a historical document; Doyle’s poetic wanderings will reward readers willing to follow his lonely path. (Malahat Review, Winter 2012)

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), 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.

.