Doug Hyde, with his wide lens and clear eye, draws us in through his meticulous observation of both nature and human nature. He shows us what it feels like to climb a mountain, to note bird songs or a returning nesting squirrel, or to feel the poignancy of intimate engagement with those he loves. The love poems seem lit from within. There is puckish humor here too, as when he manages to get a granddaughter to behave at table or to wear clothes while helping to build a wall. There is also loss in the lived experience recounted, as when love is temporarily lost until a bridge can be rebuilt. In the face of life's inevitable losses, Hyde's poems offer solace: "And so we persevere . . . measuring our days." He tells "heart's truth," and our souls are nourished as if we'd spent time with an especially wise and observant friend.
One of the many pleasures of Douglas Hyde's Footnotes is the quiet, perceptive, and inviting conversational voice that powers the poems, guiding readers through a sharply detailed landscape of people and places. Rich images, poignant insights, and witty narratives about familiar experiences beguile and coax us to a fascinating interplay of the intellect and the senses, the provocative and the downright entertaining.
Hyde, Douglas: - For as long as he can remember, Doug Hyde has been drawn to writing. During a long professional career in law and business, he often wrote, as he says for pay, even though he regularly turned to personal writing to figure things out. Not so long ago, he researched and authored an as-yet unpublished memoir to record family history, stories and childhood memories for succeeding generations. For the past decade, he has con- centrated on poetry, finding it a rewarding discipline for investigating inner lives and external environments, sometimes making sense of them and sometimes prying up more questions. Attracted to both fresh and salt water, Doug currently divides his time between a home in the Lake Champlain islands that he shares with his wife, Margy, and the cottage they occupy seasonally on Elbow Cay, Abaco, Bahamas. These locations often anchor Doug's poetry, as does the small Vermont town in which he grew up. His immediate family includes four adult children, some with partners, together with five grandchildren who occasionally find themselves at the center of a poem. Doug's poetry draws on his affection for outdoor activity: morning walks, bike riding, hiking, boating on Lake Champlain and the Sea of Abaco, gardening, and occasionally fishing. He is an accomplished photographer, and his images often inspire and recur in his writing. During his working career in Boston and Vermont, Doug served on numerous for-profit and not-for-profit boards. Currently he is president of PERC, Inc., a charity that facilitates grants to qualified community organizations in Abaco, Bahamas.
