Today (28th April 2022) marks the publication of The Catch: Fishing for Ted Hughes (Bloomsbury) the long-awaited book by Mark Wormald, the Chair of the Ted Hughes Society and Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge.
The book had its first public reading and discussion at a Ted Hughes Society online event earlier this week, and a recording of this event will be made available soon.
Mark has also read from and spoken about the book under the auspices of Orvis (the leading fly-fishing brand) and you can see this event here:
The book has already started to receive laudatory reviews, with Alex Diggins in The Critic observing that the book
is most convincing as an account of care, love even: for fish, but most significantly for the rivers they swim through. You can’t shake the feeling that the most central relationship Hughes had was with his two beloved home rivers, the Taw and the Torridge, in Devon. Knowing how quickly rivers sicken, he became vocally involved in their protection […] Wormald, like Hughes, is intensely alert to fishing as a calendar of time’s helter-skelter rush.
And Cal Flyn writing in The Times that
In The Catch, Wormald offers a partial biography of the former poet laureate […] by filleting Hughes’s literary output – specifically, the long and complicated genesis of his 1983 collection River and the poet’s private fishing journals. The result is a fine book, penetrating and poetic, filled with honeyed prose and thoughtful criticism.
Those interested in experiencing what is a deeply moving, personal book as well as a brilliant exposition of a whole aspect of Hughes’s life and work that has been hitherto little appreciated or understood, can find more details of The Catch here, and pick it up in any good bookshop in the UK as of today.