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Bending Under the Yellow Police Tapes
by James Doyle
Poetry $12.00
- Reviews and Features
Excerpt from a Review of Bending Under the Yellow Police Tapes in Poet Lore, Spring/Summer 2008
by Philip Dacey
James Doyle, Bending Under the Yellow Police Tapes, Steel Toe Books, 2007, 100 pages, paper.
When the eponymous speaker of James Doyle’s “Minotaur” says, “My horns impale / whatever hesitates between gods,” we’re happy to conclude that in this book—Bending Under the Yellow Police Tapes—the poet escapes the monster. These poems are characterized throughout by progression from one discovery to the next, doors leading to doors, with no settling down for the cozy known. Doyle doesn’t hesitate between gods.
The gorgeous “The Mediterranean” qualifies as a signature poem, featuring as it does a sailboat and a journey that take the protagonist “too far from the sight / of shore for the usual categories.” Unlike the Doyle of the author’s note at the back of the book, who spends “lots of time” with “children and grandchildren,” Doyle the poet is paradoxically most at home away from home, assiduously avoiding those “usual categories”—one Doyle no doubt complementing the other. Just as the “current / was a series of intricate moves” and “took the boat from him,” the poet’s questing intelligence and vigorous imagination, both wedded intimately to language, act like that current and propel him forward, the route obviously less predetermined than found, so that what’s a succession of shining revelations for the reader is clearly equally such for the writer. A hint of Dickinson in the poem, when the protagonist “bowed slightly” to the sea and “the Mediterranean / bowed back,” simply confirms the sense of existential bravery as the underpinning of Doyle’s project as poet. All of which is to say, the excitement of serious exploration permeates this new book.
- Reviews of James Doyle's
Einstein Considers a Sand Dune - (Steel Toe's inaugural title—now out of print)
- Jeanne Emmons, Briar Cliff Review, 2005
- Kathleen Kirk, Rhino, 2005
- Gabriel Welsch, Small Press Review, January-February 2005
- Joe Benevento, The Green Hills Literary Lantern, 2004
- Richard Collins, Xavier Review, Spring 2004
- The Comstock Review (Online Edition), May 2004
- Thomas “Pog” Johnson, Wavelength, Summer 2004
- Matthew Smith, Verse (Online Edition), January 2005
- About the Author
- James Doyle grew up in the Bronx. He went to college in Mexico, and, later, Wisconsin. Upon graduating, he worked full-time in Wisconsin politics. After returning to school to study poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he taught at the university level in Colorado. He and his wife, poet Sharon Doyle, live in Fort Collins, Colorado. They are retired, with lots of time to read, write, and spend with their children and grandchildren. Doyle's poetry has been featured on American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily, and The Writer's Almanac.
