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.
Titles Purchased
- 1-5
- 6-10
- 11-15
- 16-20
- Over 20
Price p/Title
- €9.95
- €8.95
- €7.95
- €6.95
- €5.95
Listen to a sample
What to expect
‘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
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