The Art of Angling: Poems about Fishing [Hardcover]

The Art of Anglingoffers a bountiful catch of poems from around the world and through the ages on every aspect of the beloved sport.

Fishing has inspired a wealth of poetry—Tang Dynasty meditations; Japanese haiku; medieval rhymes; classic verses by Homer and Shakespeare; poems by Donne, Goethe, Tennyson, and Yeats. Modern masterpieces abound as well, by the likes of Federico García Lorca, Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes, Robert Lowell, Raymond Carver, Margaret Atwood, Audre Lorde, Richard Hugo, and Derek Walcott. In the hands of the poets collected here, fishing with a hook and line yields reflections both sparklingly light and awe-inspiringly deep. Filled with humor, nostalgia, adventure, celebrations of the beauties of nature, and metaphors for the art of living,The Art of Anglingis sure to lure anglers and lovers of poetry alike.

A warm, witty, and wise collection . . . This anthology gathers genuine, artful verse . . . Good literary stuff to accompany a single malt by the fire. Buy a copy for the study and another to be battered in your angling grip. --Gray's Sporting Journal

Poet, essayist and winner of the Oregon Book Award, Henry Hughes is a professor of English at Western Oregon University. He is also the editor of the Everyman's Pocket Classic anthologyFishing Stories.

From the Foreword by Henry Hughes

I have been fishing and reading all my life, and the strands of those experiences have braided lines strong enough to hold just about anything that swims. As a boy, plying the waters off Long Island and imagining the creatures that swam below, I thrilled to the bite and pull of the line, wild with fascination and desire when a brassy porgie or silver snapper flashed into view below the dock. Men stepped off boats with huge bluefish and stripers, told stories of even bigger fins and broken lines, tides and depth, sharks and birds, storms and wrecks. There were always mysterious forcelcr