Ted Hughes talk: British Poet Laureate's Longford links

Watercourses have the ability to restore the soul.

From the tinkling of tiny tributaries to the lapping of a lake, the rhythmic soundscape creates a point in time of tranquillity. 

Fishermen know this. The calm of casting lines draws enthusiasts to waterways the world over to engage in a pastime that embodies art and practicality.

In his book 'The Catch: Fishing for Ted Hughes' author Dr Mark Wormald explores this attraction through its appeal to one of the 20th century's great poets.

Using Hughes’s collection of poems, River, and his fishing diaries as a guide, the Lecturer at Pembroke College Cambridge visited places the poet fished.

That journey brought him to Longford, and at the end of this month he returns for the Granard Booktown Festival.

The genesis of the book came when Dr Wormald unearthed letters and fly fishing memorabilia relating to British Poet Laureate Hughes, the American-born Irish contemporary artist, Barrie Cooke, and Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney.

The three were great friends during the course of their artistic and literary lives with Cooke and Hughes especially close because of their love of fly fishing.

The Catch was such a hit that Classic Anglers Magazine awarded it 'Book of the Year' an accolade the academic is particularly pleased with.

“I'm very proud of that,” he tells the Leader, his delight audible in a voice that has travelled across copper wires from Cambridge to Longford.

That award recognises the accessibility of what could have been a scholarly endeavour: “I started all of this off thinking I would write an academic essay about Ted Hughes' fishing diaries. Over the course of the eight years it took to write, it became a very personal book.”

Booker Prize winning novelist, Graham Swift, who fished with Ted Hughes, offered some advice: “He said 'your challenge is to write about fishing in a way that makes sense to someone who doesn't fish and someone who is not an academic'.

“I inhibited my impulse to explain and interpret and instead replace that with a desire to tell the story. So I'm really pleased that it has reached even non-fishing women,” he joked.

Longford features in Hughes' 1986 book River: “One particular poem, Saint's Island, is about that experience.

He fished with Barry Cook to get out of an increasingly notorious, vilified public life,” Dr Wormald says of his subject.

“It meant a huge amount to him, fishing with Barry, all over Ireland,” he says, “Fishing is the best way of engaging with experiencing the natural world.

“He said when he's been fishing, he lost the power of forming words.

“His was a complete concentration on the life of water, the surface of the water, reading the water, working out atmospheric conditions and the way that fish would behave as a result of that, and then catching the things.”

The loss of words was a temporary aberration: “The words came back and formed these most remarkable poems. His concentration and total absorption was something more active than contemplation.

 “He compared hunting, poaching and fishing. He said fishing was the purest and mildest form of the essential life activity that united single-celled creatures with mammals. And that passion, absolutely essential to life, was to capture and kill prey.”

Observing life is the essence of poetry. Mark says the crossover of poetry and fishing is more than symbolic: “It's the most acute observation of the natural world, whether it's identifying the particular species of fly, which is hatching, which he needs to match to the fly he's using, or just knowledge of the behaviour of the pike lurking under the surface of Lough Ree.”

Not every experience of fishing is tranquil: “Ted and his son Nick were fishing on Lough Ree in 1978 in a gale. They almost got blown off. Neither Ted nor Nick wore life jackets. It was a very hairy moment for them.”

The author says fishing and poetry are appropriate bedfellows: “The language captures an overlap or even a coincidence, an identity. In poetry and fishing we are casting a line, and we say tight lines. Ted wrote, as well as cast, tight lines.”

Mark's Booktown contribution will see him in conversation with John Connell.

He says the discussion will, appropriately, be fluid: “I hope we'll also talk about the book I'm writing now. It's about Barry Cook and his friendship with Ted and Seamus and John Montagu.

“I hope we'll also talk about the state of our waters, which Ted was a passionate defender of and advocate for, but which on both sides of the Irish Sea are not in the conditions they should be.

“For Ted, fishing was his way of breathing, as he told Barry's daughter Anya. When you are immersed, as close to the natural world as you are when you're fishing, you notice all the damage we do to our waters. He's an inspiration and a reproach still to us.”

Dr Mark Wormald in conversation with John Connell will be in Granard Library on Sunday April 21 at 12pm.