Caitlin Doyle Poetry

“Caitlin Doyle writes highly original poems . . .

… poems steeped in both meaning and musicality… whether she is constructing in free verse or in more traditional forms, Doyle’s surprising creations use ‘sound as a doorway to sense’… Doyle’s poems are serious and complex, but also witty and playful, and it’s this tension that makes her writing so innovative… although she is a poet and not a fiction writer, she shares Flannery O’Connor and Faulkner’s Southern-gothic flair for unsettling (sometimes comic) domestic scenes. The Brontë sisters, Isak Dinesen’s tales, and Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” also spring to mind, for in Doyle’s modern-day rhymes, there are most certainly goblins lurking in the forest and madwomen hiding in the attic.” … from Gwarlingo [more]

“Doyle is a rising star in American poetry…”

… from The Irish Echo [more]

“Poet Caitlin Doyle… grew up in an Irish immigrant household where poetry and song were ever-present… while so many young poets today are writing free verse… Doyle often prefers a more formal style… to use language in a way that prompts readers to let down their guard and enter a poem for the visceral pleasure of the sounds…”

… from PBS NewsHour Poetry Series [more]

“This poem is a masterpiece masquerading as a Mother Goose rhyme…”

… from judge’s commentary on “Wish,” Frost Farm Poetry Prize [more]

“Funfair rides provide a giddying setting for an ambiguous and perilous erotic merry-go-round…

… “Carnival” demonstrates the effectiveness of a “combination of story and song,” with each element being used to
complement and complicate the other.                                                               The poem’s external patterning depends on the carefully interlocked symmetry and repetition we associate with songs and their pleasurable memorability, but the narrative itself is oblique and teasing, with the potential for carnivalesque disruption…”

… Carol Rumens, The Guardian Poetry Column [more]

“Caitlin Doyle writes haunting and memorable poetry…

… about the familiar and the strange. Her poetry is a fine example of what I call strategic artistry, as if her words have been carefully held back until they burst into light at just the right moment…”  

…Ted Kooser, American Life In Poetry [more]

Caitlin Doyle is a poet with “a gorgeous, original imagination…”

… Robert Pinsky

… from Boston University Today [more]

“Much has been made of her work                                                               with rhyme and wordplay….

which she employs to heighten the ominousness of her subjects… But something more complex than wordplay is at work… Her true aim is something different, and serves a specific purpose: to examine the merits and dysfunctions of faux worlds (call them self-delusion, fantasy, or simply nothingness) that haunt and displace traditional realities… as in the darkly wonderful “If Siegfried and Roy Had Never Met,” which creates for the two performers an alternate narrative… In the ominous “Ocean City,” a similar dichotomy edges the dueling shores, one festooned with false idols of commerce, the other all too real… These mirror images bleed together, Escher-like and unsettling… Doyle is keenly attuned to the haunting counterparts to the authentic…”

… from “Doyle & the Ersatz Life” [more]

“Thirteen by Caitlin Doyle is such a remarkable…

combination of ideas and wordplay around the transformations to a girl in her thirteenth year that it is like a socks-on-carpet spark to the brain…”

… from a review of Best New Poets [more]

“Caitlin Doyle’s poem “Not It”… dances around the dread of lost youth… The eeriness of Doyle’s poem, its atmospheric menace, comes precisely from its formal techniques…” 

                                                                                                    
“Caitlin Doyle’s poem “Not It”… dances around the dread of lost youth… lifting to the reader’s lips a spoonful of what E.A. Robinson calls “the blank taste of time”… The thirty-two line poem consists of one long sinuous sentence. There is nowhere to stop and breathe, and that’s part of the point… Doyle repeats several phrases, chopping and blending them until, like a word uttered a hundred times, they leak the bright fluid of meaning. Denotation fades. Music obtains… Reading this poem feels like being a child and spinning in a circle to savor dizziness… What is pursuing the speaker? Death? Time? No abstraction seems appropriate, because whatever it is, whatever dreadful thing pursues the speaker through the poem’s fugitive syntax, it lives in the poem’s sound. It moves in repetition, in half-rhymes… in the dance of hymn meter… Yet there is a paradox here… The eeriness of Doyle’s poem, its atmospheric menace, comes precisely from its formal techniques… The world pulses through the squares of the net, caught but angry”

… Forester McClatchey, 32 Poems Marginalia Series [more]

“Doyle’s devotion to musicality…

… is the edifice of her poetry… she uses rhyme as a device to puncture the expectations of the physical world… producing work both cosmopolitan and mythic… Doyle’s poems, whether playful or serious in tone, always possess layers of complexity that reward multiple readings… Doyle’s technical approaches vary widely, and so do her subjects and tones… She examines history, popular culture, and personal experience, all with equal commitment and depth… For Doyle, formal considerations and rhythmic effects exist in a rich and complicated relationship to one another…”

… from “Emerging Poets to Watch” [more]

Rebecca Foust highlights Caitlin’s work as an example of how “form can set you free in your writing and reading of poetry…”

… from Poetry Sunday  [more]