The Catch

Author Mark Wormald
Narrator Mark Wormald
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing
Run Time 13 hours and 54 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Biography and non-fiction prose, Biography: writers, Fishing, angling, Literature: history and criticism, Memoirs, Sports and Active outdoor recreation.

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What to expect

‘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.

Critics Review

Penetrating and poetic, filled with honeyed prose and thoughtful criticism.
The Times
Astute and fluent, The Catch wears its learning lightly… Compelling
Country Life
Way above a mere fishing book, combining nature, personal recollections, biography, poetry, imagination and much more – BOOK OF THE YEAR
Classic Angling Magazine
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.
Caught by the River
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.
The Mail on Sunday
Electrifyingly good
London Review Bookshop
A beautiful book … Wormald is excellent at prising apart Hughes the myth from Hughes the man.
The Critic
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.
The Field
As a feat of scholarship, angling, and creative empathy, this book is an extraordinary achievement
Dublin Review of Books
Beyond biographical and instead a complete immersion into the mind and life of one of our greatest writers … A dip well worth taking
Fallon's Angler
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”.
Robert Macfarlane
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.
Adam Nicolson
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.
Paul Whitehouse
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.
Harry Clifton
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.
Amy-Jane Beer
A torrent of a book, its swirling deeps and dark backwaters lit with hard-won insight.
Luke Jennings
Engaging and enlightening, a new and convincing key to Hughes’s extraordinary poetic gifts.
Richard Beard
A brilliant book. Complex, kaleidoscopic, brilliant in its originality, The Catch is a love song to a lifelong obsession.
Katharine Norbury
A rare piece of work – modest, brilliant, moving. Quietly profound
Ian Sansom
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
David Profumo

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The Catch

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