A Poet Looks At Rivers And Fishing

Big Water
John Engels
Lyons and Burford, $22.95, paper, ISBN 1-55821-358-9
Afterword by David Huddle
Art by Alan James Robinson

I worry that either this fine book will not get read widely enough--because many of its potential readers don't think of themselves as readers of poetry--or that it will get hyped too hard by those who do. Reading good poetry is about as difficult as tying trout flies--no more, no less. In either case, a sustained attention to details leaves you with a rewarding, useful pattern.

But despite the brilliance of John Engels's work in Big Water, fly fishing doesn't need a "poet laureate," a dusty, elitist appellation with which neither reader nor author should be burdened. What you have in Big Water is a volume of verse by a sun- and windburned poet who has logged some serious time in rivers and reflection. This is not the mawkish stuff you see in old fishing books or the precious "creative writing" you sometimes see in magazines. This is the real thing, an important chunk of American poetry permeated with the challenges to intellect and imagination that American writers have always found in the American woods.

The core of Engels's stuff is density of experience and precision of language, which leaves the complex clarity of a well-tied knot behind--no literary nature-faking here:

. . . Everywhere flashed green bolts
of dragonflies, snakes and turtles cruised
the channels, feathers of mud braided lakeward. At dawn
came the ducks, the sky awash to the feathery roots
of its undersoils--mallard and canvasback,
teal swung in to the blinds, or flared
on some sheen of the wind. In the marshes at Suamico,
watchful, we felt the world born down
by its own abundances. . . .

—"The Marshes at Suamico, Wisconsin"

Engels's convincing presentation of the natural world's "abundances"--familiar to every fly fisherman--proves he isn't using nature for purely literary purposes, the way many contemporary poets often do. He's been there. But he also steers clear of the usual fog of sentimentality and cliché that obscures what real contact with nature does to a man's mind and heart. In these poems, he's up to his eyeballs in marsh mud or moving water or memories, devolving stunning perceptions.

When night comes in, wary
as a trout, ready in an instant
to shrink back
onto the kernel of darkness
from which it hatched
I've thought it might be worth dying
just to drown and be buried here.
You need to stand
to your knees in the Winooski at night all night
in wait for the back flow
of darkness . . . .
—"At Night on the River"

There is poetry here that fishermen will have special access to, but it will take you from the familiar to the strange and then maybe only halfway back again. No jangling conclusions, no pious sentiments. So in "The Disconnections" the shock of losing a sailfish begins, just barely, to look like a gain:

. . . --my hands
loosened on the rod, my heart
giving way a little, salt crystals
grainy on my lips, my wondering
how it might have been this time
to have brought him flaring and wallowing
in iridescences of spray boatside,
wide-gilled and azure, shimmering, gaffed him in
and lashed him down astern, swathed him
in damp sacking against the sun.

And sometimes it's the river that gets away, as in "Looking for Water," in which the angler stumbles into a country graveyard on his way to find new water and is left high and dry, thwarted and changed by an unexpected experience:

A river is supposed to be nearby, and reachable
and since in a strange place the first thing
is to look for running water, I ask, and discover
that no one knows exactly
where the river is, though
there's plenty of speculation . . . .

My distaste for poet laureates notwithstanding, perhaps "An Anglers vade mecum" should hang on every fly fisherman's wall, the ghostly narrator of which will stop you in your tracks as surely as Coleridge's ancient mariner collared the wedding guest.

Here is the opening of the poem:

1
Remember that the simplest eddy,
current and cross-current,
appall the fly. Remember also
that the fly should swim
as dun from nymph and imago

from dun. Be awareof season, of how trout go dull
and take on color with the trees.
Remember that the planet
trembles to a falling leaf
for trout. Therefore, be cautious

how you walk the riverbanks.

Engels sometimes reminds me of Robert Frost and sometimes of that resolute southerner James Dickey, but mostly his voice is planed to flat midwestern tones, tuned to understate strong emotions, and the memories of his personas seem haunted by Wisconsin river and place names. The second part of this volume, "The North Branch," may well put you in mind of Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time and Nick Adam's poignant, postwar exploration of a scorched, recovering heartland.

If you haven't read poetry in years, read these poems--aloud, in the evening. And then try Jim Harrison's The Theory and Practice of Rivers and New Poems (Clark City Press), another distinguished recent addition to the poetics of being on good water surrounded by diminished woods. RWOL

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