I first met Mike Doyle after I moved here in the mid-1980s. He and his wife at the time were leaders in the Catholic social justice movement around the issue of peace and nonviolence. Pax Christi, the Catholic peace organization, used to meet in their suburban home in Saanich. Mike was an English professor at UVic and also a published author under the name of Charles Doyle, his academic nom de plume.
     While I knew that about him, I was not prepared for the excellence of his poetry. Reading Mike Doyle, for me, is like encountering a dialogue with yourself, discovering a side of relationships his words uncannily precipitate in your mind.
     Take this excerpt as an example from his volume Separate Fidelities (1991), the poems identify with the process of marriage separation after 30 years.

    I first met Mike Doyle after I moved here in the mid-1980s. He and his wife at the time were leaders in the Catholic social justice movement around the issue of peace and nonviolence. Pax Christi, the Catholic peace organization, used to meet in their suburban home in Saanich. Mike was an English professor at UVic and also a published author under the name of Charles Doyle, his academic nom de plume.
     While I knew that about him, I was not prepared for the excellence of his poetry. Reading Mike Doyle, for me, is like encountering a dialogue with yourself, discovering a side of relationships his words uncannily precipitate in your mind.
     Take this excerpt as an example from his volume Separate Fidelities (1991), the poems identify with the process of marriage separation after 30 years.

The Silent House
The house I have left is a big house
 with many rooms. My children,
 the four of them, grew up there.
 This house is a little house
 I live in by myself. Old, but new.     
Back there,
 in all rooms lurk soft  memories
 of my children and, among the      
trees, squirrels…
 Will they ever come out again
 from this hibernation of the soul?

 Here, in these few rooms, the echoes
 are on a wavelength unknown to me.
 It’s as if I’ve become a memory
 displaced, or a shadowy interloper,
 feigning quiet in hoping to live
 peacefully with the animal silence.

2. MILIEU

     Victoria is full of talented poets, many like Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane, Patricia and Terence Young and Rhonda Batchelor and Charles Lillard were married couples who have been widely awarded, recognized and celebrated in poetry circles in the city and well beyond. I have read them all and heard them read and fully acknowledge their gifts, talents, quality and general accomplishments.
     But when I think of the best male/female tandem of Victoria poets, they all seem to occupy a distant second place. None of them would claim to rival the one who easily occupies the most revered spot, PK Page. She is so good that she has the distinction of having a beer bottle thrown at her by perhaps Victoria's most notorious street poet. Gratefully he missed, probably on purpose. The bad boy and girl poets also abound in Victoria, often banned from venues they would rather not frequent anyway.
     It is quite a thriving poetry culture in ‘that Victoria’ as my maternal grandfather, Patrick Harris, used to depict it in a radically different context. There are the punk poets versus the celebrity poets, the academic poets and the feminist poets, to be distinguished from the women poets and the lady poets.
     There are the political poets, the esoteric ones, the middle brow poets versus the middle class poets and these are just largely the female varieties, without reference to the historical precedents of the cowboy-logger poets of the 1950s, 60s and 70s before they were pushed largely off stage. Patrick Lane is a survivor of those whiskey wars. Charles Lillard did not survive.
     My thumbnail analysis after studying the literary scene for some time is that while there are many poets and much poetry, there are very few finished poems being recited, slammed or dunked at the too much applause for too little effort events that happen on Friday and other evenings throughout the regular season.

3. P.K.’S PAGES

     Patricia Kathleen Page won the Governor General’s award for poetry in 1957 and never looked back after that. Her prestige grew to the point of sainthood in such circles. The best known weekly poetry venue in Victoria was named after her poem Planet Earth a decade ago. There she was celebrated with special readings and poetry written under her inspiration last fall. They gave her the Order of Canada in 1999. She died a few years ago and had left word in her will to sponsor a literary soiree at a fancy restaurant for her friends, fellow poets, followers and hangers on. She was clearly a classy babe.
     It was PK Page who said about Mike Doyle how he was the undiscovered treasure of Canadian poetry. Its true, and immediately after I moved here in 1985 I could readily see how only Mike Doyle was in her league locally, and it seems in her estimation, nationally.
 Pretty well unknown, its time Mike got his just deserts. Of course, some people feel he already has. Such is the often times petty world of literary salons. Its true that Ekstasis Editions husband and wife publisher team Richard Olafson and Carole Sokoloff (saints in their own rites) have championed him with more than a dozen volumes in recent years including his Collected Poems 1951-2009 (published 2010).
      The truth is that Mike, for all his talent  or maybe because of it – is not all that easy to be around. We have had our own falling out and thus ongoing distance. But as my now deceased friend Steve Bentheim said about him, he easily has the greatest vocabulary of all the writers in Victoria.
     Like Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Mike does not suffer fools gladly but he displays his superiority with such a sophisticated touch of the velvet glove, you only half realize later how much you were put in your place; after you unravel the play on words vocabulary and complicated syntax. Not everyone has the Catholic humility to accept such redress with good grace. Thus, one reason why he has not been revered and esteemed by the masses like his counterpart PK is that his snobbery is more of the working class sort. 
     One unavoidable conclusion to reading closely PK Page’s travel memoirs Hand Luggage is her upper class snobbery. In a way it is half her charm, certainly the basis for her self-assurance. Canadians on some level still want to be seen as provincials, and she subconsciously satisfies that not so secret yearning.
     Psychologically, Mike Doyle is somewhat the same. You almost don't want to argue with him or prove him wrong as he has constructed a self-image and sense of identity that might be his most admirable work of art. Certainly it imbues all his work with a sort of panache only found in the most self-assured artists. Unfortunately for Mike’s reputation as a poet, Canadians don’t take to subtle putdowns by non-aristocrats.
     The friend through whom I met Mike was his student and a spiritual searcher who has a caring capacity and the superior sort of intelligence to never quite let on what she spots in this vein. I’ve tried to imitate her spiritual style but the separation with Mike fell in the tail end of the period before  I was able to perfect this trait in any convincing way.
     Once when we did meet in a hotel bar for drinks with friends and acquaintances, he confided that he had replaced his Catholicism with his pursuit of the poetic muse, his own version of the ‘spiritual but not religious’ category of religious self-understanding. (See "'Spiritual But Not Religious' — A New Phenomenon" under the FEATURES tab.)
     I had little to say because I could see what he was getting at, how it made sense for him and I appreciated that his lengthy previous Roman Catholicism had given body to his spirituality; religion being the price you pay for an authentic spirituality.

4. SUPERIORITY

     I have long seen Mike and PK, then, as parallel sorts of snobs; she of the English aristocratic sort, blended with a rural Alberta Canadian upbringing. Mike, as the name indicates is the cosmopolitan working class Irish mendicant blend.
     While they may both put others under a certain sort of class and classy strain, you will not detect it in the writing. There is no strain to be seen in their work, that is their clear superiority. You won’t sense the reaching effort and strain of lesser poets. Their work glides painlessly, taking you for the sort of joyride of revelation and precise articulation great work can do.