One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder for the Spiritual and Nonspiritual Alike

The life and work of Doyle (A Book of Uncommon Prayer), the late writer and long-serving editor of Portland Magazine, are honored with this fine collection of his essays. Longtime friend and writer David James Duncan (The Brothers K) begins with an intimate introduction that situates Doyle as a literary cult figure: not popularly known, but passionately admired by some for his distinctive punctuation-defying verbal flow and his everyday epiphanies. Doyle, who died of brain cancer in 2017, trained his perceptive eye on a wide range of subjects during his career, but frequently wrote on wildlife (such as hummingbirds and sturgeon), the nature of family, and the relationship between creativity and spirituality. Doyle’s curiosity is insatiable (“you see an owl launch at dusk, like a burly gray dream against the last light, you flinch a little, and are awed...”) and his self-described Celtic-mystic disposition spots the transcendent regularly (“Time stutters and reverses and it is always yesterday and today”). As much haunted by the language of James Joyce as the lessons of Jesus, Doyle sees and celebrates what happens every day in each essay of this eclectic collection. This “best-of” should enlarge his circle of admirers. [em](Dec.) [/em]