The Catch : Fishing for Ted Hughes

‘An absolute gem . . . I was delightfully lost by the river throughout’ Paul Whitehouse‘Marvellous . . . The Catch leaves both its writer and its reader wonderfully "lost in water"’ Robert Macfarlane‘Penetrating and poetic, filled with honeyed prose and thoughtful criticism’ The TimesA 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. _______________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’s way of breathing – and because the poet's writing has made Mark understand that it has always been his way of breathing, too. Using Hughes’s poetry collection River and his fishing diaries as a guide, Mark returns again and again to the rivers and lakes in Britain and Ireland where the poet fished. At times, he uses Ted's fly patterns; at others 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 Mark fishes after the sudden death of his mother and during the slow fading of his father.