About the Book
‘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 Times
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.
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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.
About the Author :
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. 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).
Review :
Penetrating and poetic, filled with honeyed prose and thoughtful criticism.
Astute and fluent, The Catch wears its learning lightly… Compelling
Way above a mere fishing book, combining nature, personal recollections, biography, poetry, imagination and much more - BOOK OF THE YEAR
Whilst Hughes’s love for angling is relatively well-known, Wormald makes a deep and sustained claim for the link between Hughes’s poetic thinking process and the act of fishing. … [But] The carrying streams of this book are not only those of Hughes’s life, and those of his family and friends, but of Wormald’s too. … Wormald’s own prose is sprung and striking [and] The Catch becomes a subtle meditation on what it is to be a father, a son, a brother.
Wormald’s scene-setting and imaginative, close reading of the poems uncover new aspects of Hughes and his work, which is no easy task … Hughes thought the all-absorbing experience of fishing was much like writing poetry, and such descriptions will have the fishermen among this book’s readership nodding along.
Electrifyingly good
A beautiful book … Wormald is excellent at prising apart Hughes the myth from Hughes the man.
A profoundly reflective examination of Hughes’s fishing life, layered over with Wormald’s own … Wormald has an engaging, lyrical style, by which it’s easy to be beguiled into appreciative enjoyment and even wonder.
As a feat of scholarship, angling, and creative empathy, this book is an extraordinary achievement
Beyond biographical and instead a complete immersion into the mind and life of one of our greatest writers … A dip well worth taking
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".
Here is a book and a writer and a sense of the world and of language which are all as marvellous as the subject deserves.
An absolute gem ... Mark Wormald's love of angling and of Ted Hughes’s poetry come together beautifully. I was delightfully lost by the river throughout.
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 makes 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.
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.
A torrent of a book, its swirling deeps and dark backwaters lit with hard-won insight.
Engaging and enlightening, a new and convincing key to Hughes’s extraordinary poetic gifts.
A brilliant book. Complex, kaleidoscopic, brilliant in its originality, The Catch is a love song to a lifelong obsession.
A rare piece of work - modest, brilliant, moving. Quietly profound
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
