In Softwood Trumpets, poet and scholar Mike Doyle continues his “notes on poets and poetics” shared in a previous volume, Paper Trombones. Taking off where the earlier volume ends, Softwood Trumpets serves as a chronicle of Doyle’s daily meditations on poetry. Whether discussing great figures of the past or his contemporaries in the local and national literary community, the poet records impressions that are deeply referential, but never reverential. Born and raised in England, from an Irish family, Doyle later moved to New Zealand and then spent the last 45 years in Victoria, BC where he taught literature at the University of Victoria. As both an insider and an outsider, he is uniquely positioned to make wide and uncompromising observations. Doyle’s perspicacity is restrained by a wry and unassuming intelligence, suggesting a reserved, postmodern Samuel Pepys adrift in the garden paradise of Victoria. Softwood Trumpets is an illuminating commentary on books and people, in which Mike Doyle probes the meaning of a life lived through poetry.

Mike Doyle has lived in Victoria since 1968. His first poetry collection A Splinter of Glass (1956) was published in New Zealand; his first Canadian collection is Earth Meditations (Coach House, 1971), his lastest, Collected Poems 1951-2009 (Ekstasis, 2010). He is recipient of a PEN New Zealand award and a UNESCO Creative Artist’s Fellowship. He has also written (as Charles Doyle) a biography of Richard Aldington and critical work on William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, James K. Baxter, and others.