Big Water [Paperback]

John Engels (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 1995

The dramatic life of anglers and their waters.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

This has the makings of a crossover hit: a book of marvelous poetry about fly-fishing and fishers. Engels writes clean, direct free verse in which external events slowly merge with internal ones, in which spirit infuses flesh, in which image and meaning are inseparable. In one splendid poem, he sees a muskrat swimming on a nearby lake in early evening and, from his lighted doorway, raises his hand toward it. The frightened animal, seeing "the long, articulated shadows of thumb and finger" cast on the water--"out over the lake / out there, where / through the cold adaptive fires / of the cold stone of the fireless moon / the muskrat swam"--dives frantically. It leaves a debris of cattails, the poet's action having the opposite of its intended effect, not capturing the magical being but making the world colder as the animal disappears with its "small, inexplicable fire." Engels reveals the world of the fly fisher's rivers to be a locus of passion and solitude, of spiritual yearning and revelation, of companionship and loss. Patricia Monaghan --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"A real treasure...such pure writing!" --Ted Hughes

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 104 pages
• Publisher: Lyons Press; 1st edition (March 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1558213589
• ISBN-13: 978-1558213586
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,360,694 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Born in South Bend, Indiana, in 1931, John Engels attended the University of Notre Dame, graduating in 1952 with an AB in English. After three years in the Navy, he went on to University College, Dublin, where he studied Anglo-Irish Literature, and then to the Iowa Writers' Workshops, from which he graduated with an M.F.A. in 1957. After five years at St. Norbert College in West DePere, Wisconsin, he joined the English faculty at St. Michael's College in Colchester, Vermont, where he has taught since 1962. He has been a lecturer at Sweet Briar College, Randolph-Macon Woman's College, Middlebury College, and Emory University, as well as at the University of Alabama. In 1995 he was Wyndham Robertson Chair in Creative Writing, at Hollins College. Since 1975 in collaboration with David Huddle, he has conducted the Spring Writing Workshop at the University of Vermont. He was Frost Fellow at Bread Loaf Writers Conference in 1976, and has received two National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship (1980), a Fulbright Fellowship (Yugoslavia, 1985), as well as a Rockefeller Foundation residency at Bellagio in 1991. In 1997 he received a National YMCA Residency Fellowship. He was resident poet at the Frost Place in 1988, and later Frost Place Fellow at Annaghmakerrig, in Ireland. Weather-Fear (University of Georgia Press) was a Pulitzer finalist in 1983, and Cardinals in the Ice Age (Graywolf Press) an American Poetry Series selection in 1987.