Savage Gods, Silver Ghosts

Book excerpt: They met at a poetry reading, but Ehor Boyanowsky and British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes became friends through their shared — and unquenchable — passion for fishing. Against the backdrop of the Dean River, one of the greatest steelhead rivers in the world, the two men explored their mutual regard for the planet's wild places. Boyanowsky draws on personal correspondence, interviews, and journal entries to recreate their encounters in the 1980s and '90s, when Hughes was at the height of his power and influence, and to paint an intimate portrait of a lifelong outdoorsman, conservationist, and artist. The book also goes behind the creative process as fishing logs transmute into poetry, talk becomes action, and the queen's bard composes impromptu bawdy verse on the drive to a stag party. Boyanowsky realizes he's been privileged to see a Hughes who is different from the public persona. In these tales of male friendship and the primal act of fly fishing, the reader gets glimpses of the "nature red in tooth and claw" that drew Ted Hughes to Canada — and rekindled his love of the natural world.