“QUIET MIRACLES,” THAT’S what the late writer Brian Doyle calls them, those moments of wonder so freighted with significance they inscribe themselves upon our hearts. If there is a unifying thread in One Long River of Song, a posthumous collection of Doyle’s essays and prose poetry, it is this: Quiet miracles bespot our lives. They are everywhere, if only we have the patience and humility to see them as such.
Consider a shrew or a hummingbird or a can of anchovies clutched to a young boy’s sleeping chest. That’s what Doyle does. He finds miracle and mystery enough to still your heart, bring you to tears, or leave you smirking and smiling in awe. Revealing and reveling in such wonders is what Doyle does best. And he does it time and time again, in short prose poems and essays that rarely run over two pages long.
Doyle won a Catholic Book Award and three Pushcart Prizes, and he was published in a host of publications, including Best American Essays, Best American Spiritual Writing, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Harper’s Magazine. But he will be remembered more for his ability to reveal the marvelous in the seemingly mundane. Speaking of a wonderfully unlikely game of catch he shared with his father some decades before, Doyle wrote, “A moment like that ought to be resurrected regularly, [and] sung for the gift it is.” In essay after essay, that is what Doyle does. He resurrects the quiet miracles in his life so that we might better recognize them in our own. That is his gift to us, and for that we can be thankful.
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