Trout Spawning at Lardeau River

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia and is the
co-editor of Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

Imagine a hand reaching down into tangled brown grass and dead leaves.
The hand pulls out a dusty lump and wipes it clean. The discovery is
transformed into a gold nugget shining in the sun. And the formerly
dreary scene around it shines in the golden light. That is what Mike
Doyle manages to do in poem after poem in this marvelous collection.

The title captures the gist of what this book is about: not fishing but
journeys upstream to the source and to beginnings. Almost every poem
touches on the idea of a quest and an arrival: “here we are / at the
highest point / of our journey, / eight thousand feet, / in a small
Chihuahua / railway town” (“At Creel”).

Oh sure, you say. More nature poems. Just what we need. But they’re
not nature poems: they’re poems about a poet finding joy and beauty in
a life that includes nature.

No postmodern posturing. No deconstruction of language or of linearity.
The author is seeing and feeling the greatness of the world and telling
us about it. What a novel idea.