The Catch: Fishing for Ted Hughes

Description

It is in the midst of a swirling river, casting a line, that Mark Wormald meets Ted Hughes. He stands where the poet stood, forty years ago, because fishing was Ted Hughes' way of breathing - and because Ted's writing has made Mark understand that it has always been his way of breathing, too. Using Ted Hughes' collection of poems, River, and his fishing diaries as a guide, Mark returns again and again to the places where Ted Hughes fished. At times, he uses the fly patterns Ted recommended; at others, he uses his rods. It is an obsession; a fundamental connection to nature; a thrilling wildness; an elemental pursuit. But it is also a release and a consolation, as he fishes after the sudden death of his mother and during the slow fading of his father. A brilliant blend of memoir and biography, The Catch is a stunning meditation on poetry and nature, and a quiet reflection on what it means to be a father and a son.

Mark Wormald has been fishing since the age of four. He is an award-winning poet, winning the Newdigate Prize at Oxford in 1988 and an E. C. Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 1995. Mark has been a Fellow in English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, since 1992. His first office was once the bedsitting room in which Ted Hughes dreamed of a burned fox. He edited Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers for Penguin Classics and more recently co-edited two collections of essays: Ted Hughes: from Cambridge to Collected (2013) and Ted Hughes, Nature and Culture (2018).

What a marvellous book The Catch is: a time-slipping, genre-shifting exploration of lives and landscapes, in which poetry, memoir and biography swirl and braid most beautifully together. Obsessive, passionate and deep-pooled, Wormald's pursuit of Hughes becomes, over its course, unexpectedly and movingly personal: a journey inwards in spirit as well as backwards in time, moving against the flow. The Catch leaves both its writer and its reader - to borrow a phrase from the book itself - wonderfully "lost in water". * Robert Macfarlane * What an absolute gem this is. Mark Wormald's love of angling and of Ted Hughes's poetry come together beautifully. I was delightfully lost by the river throughout. * Paul Whitehouse * A torrent of a book, its swirling deeps and dark backwaters lit with hard-won insight. -- Luke Jennings Engaging and enlightening, a new and convincing key to Hughes's extraordinary poetic gifts. * Richard Beard * A rare piece of work - modest, brilliant, moving. Quietly profound. * Ian Sansom * A wonderfully beguiling and enjoyable literary pilgrimage - full of surprises and insights, to delight anyone (fisherman or not) who loves reading poetry. Truly, a remarkable book. * David Profumo * I'm perhaps more fish than fisher, but like Ted Hughes's River, this book tugs at an atavistic, aquatic consciousness at the base of my brain. Wormald's quest has me swimming in the same brilliant flows, settled in the same rooty riverside nooks, vividly drowsy, deeply awake. I loved it. * Amy-Jane Beer * Mark Wormald takes what is, on the face of it, a meaningless act -the pursuit of exact, often remote places where a famed poet and fisherman has stood, floated, angled - and made of it a parable of what angling and poetry share. The act of stalking, the stalking of fish by man, but also the stalking by man of his true self in poetry, the moment of the catch, at the instant of self-forgetfulness. * Harry Clifton *