The Kind of Brave You Wanted to Be: Prose Prayers and Cheerful Chants against the Dark

by Brian Doyle

Proems, taut tales, small stories with rhythm and blues and grace and bruise and laughter between the lines. Brian Doyle’s The Kind of Brave You Wanted to Be is a book of cadenced notes on the swirl of miracle and the holy of attentiveness; a book about children and birds, love and grief and everything alive, which is to say all prayers.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

128 pages, Paperback

Published October 13, 2016

About the author

Doyle's essays and poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The American Scholar, Orion, Commonweal, and The Georgia Review, among other magazines and journals, and in The Times of London, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Kansas City Star, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Ottawa Citizen, and Newsday, among other newspapers. He was a book reviewer for The Oregonian and a contributing essayist to both Eureka Street magazine and The Age newspaper in Melbourne, Australia.

Doyle's essays have also been reprinted in:

* the Best American Essays anthologies of 1998, 1999, 2003, and 2005;
* in Best Spiritual Writing 1999, 2001, 2002, and 2005; and
* in Best Essays Northwest (2003);
* and in a dozen other anthologies and writing textbooks.

As for awards and honors, he had three startling children, an incomprehensible and fascinating marriage, and he was named to the 1983 Newton (Massachusetts) Men's Basketball League all-star team, and that was a really tough league.

Doyle delivered many dozens of peculiar and muttered speeches and lectures and rants about writing and stuttering grace at a variety of venues, among them Australian Catholic University and Xavier College (both in Melbourne, Australia), Aquinas Academy (in Sydney, Australia); Washington State, Seattle Pacific, Oregon, Utah State, Concordia, and Marylhurst universities; Boston, Lewis & Clark, and Linfield colleges; the universities of Utah, Oregon, Pittsburgh, and Portland; KBOO radio (Portland), ABC and 3AW radio (Australia); the College Theology Society; National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation," and in the PBS film Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero (2002).

Doyle was a native of New York, was fitfully educated at the University of Notre Dame, and was a magazine and newspaper journalist in Portland, Boston, and Chicago for more than twenty years. He was living in Portland, Oregon, with his family when died at age 60 from complications related to a brain tumor.

Reviews

[Kelcie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this to feel better about the world.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am convinced that I am a better person for having discovered and read books by Brian Doyle. He writes in a language that makes me truly and deeply long to be more tender, compassionate, and kind. These poems are, as Doyle actually said of his own children in the "Acknowledgements" page, "poems of generosity and grace and wit and tenderness and humor and kindness and snickering."

[Eden · Rating 5 out of 5]

This series of poems/short essays is almost painfully good. Doyle's work is both inspiring and nostalgic, and he captures the smallest, strangest parts of the human mind in the most beautiful way possible. Every piece is strong and meaningful- there is not a weak poem to be found. His use of language is astounding, and his storytelling even more so. I highly recommend this no matter who you are or what you're going through. It will undoubtedly change your perspective.
I really look forward to becoming acquainted with more of his work.

[Doug Wells · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since Doyle's untimely death, I have been somewhat obsessed with him and his writing. I can think of no better way to describe his writing than lovely. He was a master of words as art and this collection of short poems/essays, while at times more religious in tone than I typically read, is perceptive and reassuring - balanced with melancholy at his loss.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

When you dog-ear more than half the pages, you know the writing speaks to you.

[RG · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can I give a Brian Doyle book four stars? I think 4.5.

This was my fifth Doyle read and my first encounter with his proems. I’ve loved his essays, prayers, and fiction, and obviously there’s still so much Doyliness in this collection, too—fierce attention, wild wonder, and near-boundless gratitude.

The proem package for Doyle observations is why I hesitate with my star rating. As small a thing as it is (then again, isn’t Doyle always singing the little things that are not so little?), the capitalized first letters at the beginning of enjambed lines really threw off my reading experience sometimes. The form honestly kinda bugged me.

If someone were looking for Doyle thoughts in bite-size form (even pithier than his essays), I think I’d be more likely to recommend An Uncommon Book of Prayer. That being said, I’ve never met a Doyle book I didn’t like, and this one (as all the others have) challenged me to live more attentively to the wild, vast, beautiful world in which we wander, and to see and sing the stories which stretch all around us.

[Jeremy Brundage · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just delightful. The perfect antidote to the messed up world we are living in.

[Shelley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brian Doyle’s writing is a treasure in any and every format!

[MaryJeanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I chanced upon two excerpts of Brian Doyle’s work within 20 minutes one day and immediately ordered a couple of his books. I read this collection of prose poems slowly, savoring them. In each one I underlined a word or phrase that struck home. Here are a few:

Roaring grace
Frightened and thrilled and lonely
Sparrows or pears or mercy as a marker of the divine
The odd of it all
In the fat sunlight
an illuminated us (referring to Jesus)
The huge of the tiny

That last one is a kernel of Doyle’s world view. The little things are not little.

I’d love to know how he made each line come out the same length. I don’t think he relied entirely on right/left justification… they’re too neat. Did he choose words based on their length, to come out even?

I’m sad that I didn’t discover Brian Doyle until after he died, but fortunately he was a prolific writer!

[Roseamber Sumner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brian Doyle is one of my favorite authors. He is diagnosed since a couple of months ago with a brain tumor. He has undergone surgery and had 90% of it removed but he cannot work or write at present, maybe not again in this lifetime. He has given us such gifts in his essays, books, poems, humor, love for his family, the Northwest, boats, the sea, the critters, basketball, Chicago, the mountains, the rivers, the trees, his God. These are prose poems, I read a few a day and am the richer for it.

[Anna Keating · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Brian Doyle.

[Jonathan Hiskes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prose poems/miniature essays in praise of the sacred ordinary. fully in line with the rest of Doyle's work. These "cheerful chants against the dark" don't have the same density and economy of language of convetional poems, but they are delightful, funny, perceptive, and spirited in the way that all of Doyle's books are.

[Rod Reed · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think I came across Brian Doyle a few years ago, but this is the first book of his that I’ve read. His writing is such an interesting combination of quirky, profound, beautiful, and funny. While I’m not particularly a poetry person, his writing reaches me in a way I wish I could be reached more often.

[Judy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't often read a book straight through, but this small, amazing collections of essays that read like poems, I couldn't put down. Doyle is an amazing writer and an even better human being. He sees the miracles in every small thing and helps us to see them too.

[Mary Dansak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Again, the beauty in the tiny bits of life. This is a lovely collection.

[April · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this book of prose. I liked the authenticity of the speaker. As a poet myself, Doyle inspires me to spend more time practicing the art of the prose poem.

[M Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one contains some of the poems I first read in “The Christian Century” that caused me to fall in love with Doyle’s work.

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 Stars

[Victoria Peters · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love the way Doyle plays with words. His poems gave me hope and made me laugh.

[Molly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful, rhythmic and celebratory of the everyday! I will have to reread.

[Emily Carminati · Rating 5 out of 5]

If ever a little book of poems was needed by weary, broken hearts in a weary, broken moment in the world, that book is this one and the moment is now.

[Shanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first glance, I hated it because of the poems in big paragraph chunks, which sometimes doesn't let the reader get a breath in. Then, I couldn't stop reading.

[Kate Belt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brian Doyle always evokes a roller coaster of emotions, including delight, with his poems, essays, novels, and in this case promes. This time I couldn't prevent myself from noticing how many deal with illness, aging, end of life, loss, and giving eulogies. He couldn't possibly have received his brain cancer diagnosis before this book went to print.

[Lizzy · Rating 5 out of 5]

As always, some truly incredible poems in here, and the rest are almost equally as wonderful