A fireside collection of fly-fishing pieces, touched with—but not drowned in—folksy wisdom and whimsy, from Gray’s Sporting Journal editor and columnist Babb. These short essays are divided into two groups: those inspired by Babb’s youth in, and return visits to, East Tennessee, and those that find him fishing here and there around the world, mostly in his current home state of Maine. A fly-fishing fool, Babb tries to make much of the clash between his roots, where the inhabitants have been characterized as “crude, kindly, ignorant, and murderous,” and the rarefied history of East Coast fly-fishing. But his pose as a homeboy from the Land of Goober often grates, as too many years in Massachusetts and Maine have spiffed up his persona. Not that he doesn’t hit upon some heavy truths in fishing——we found that the best signs of all said DANGER. KEEP OUT. NO TRESPASSING”—and in life——the most chilling words you can hear south of Mason and Dixon’s line: ‘Whut’re yew lookin’ at?”’ By the time he gets to the Maine pieces, Babb has lost his faux twang and the stories feel shorn, immediate, and tactile. There is a terrific brief catalog of months describing his first year in Maine and much fond quoting of Thoreau’s rhapsodies on the state. And there are the simple joys of the fly fisherman: a trip to hell in the far north country, searching for bamboo rods in yard sales, watching stunned as a false albacore makes his reel melt down. His humor, though, needs help. It can be enjoyably goofy (“I don’t see anything at all eccentric about bass-bugging with a Spey rod,” yet often plain stupid (“Soon we’ll see Mick Jagger pimping for denture adhesives, a laxative commercial backed by ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction”’). But there are pleasures ample enough here, conveyed with an infectious love of the sport.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-55821-946-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
How Lyons (Fishing Widows, 1974, etc., and president of Lyons & Burford publishers) manages, year after year, to wrest fresh, hugely entertaining material from the world of fly-fishing is a mystery. But he does. Lyons likes to fish. He likes to fish long and hard, short and delicate. He likes to fish for all manner of quarry (though the brown trout is his downfall), and he will happily fish a spinning rod when the wicked, slender fly rod won't do. And when he's not streamside, he likes to fish in his head, read about fishing, paw through his fly boxes, dream of the honey holes. Lyons just slipped past the 60 mark, recently emerged from a hospital stay, and this collection of his articles and essays is a bit more reflective than his earlier books; the humor is still there, the wit sharp, but now he's taking a bead on why fishing has given him such pleasure, enthralled him so, made him, in a word, happy. In the long run, that joy may be ineffable, yet two aspects of his avocation continue to rise to the surface: Fishing makes him think, puzzle out a stretch of water, get intimate with the currents, eddies, and backwaters; and he deeply loves the context—not just the history and literature and paraphernalia, but even more the riverine environment, ``the things that led us here in the first place: simplicity, untrampled bogs and banks, sweet silences, and perfectly exquisite beauty.'' While Lyons would run screaming from the suggestion, there is more than just a touch of the graybeard's wisdom here; when he talks of Roderick Haig-Brown's books, their ``high-level of quiet instruction, inconspicuouly offered,'' the same could be applied to this book, teachings that shape the soul of the fisherman. For Lyons, fishing is a matter of the heart, and to fishing he has blissfully lost his.
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-87113-628-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996
``All good writing,'' F. Scott Fitzgerald asserted, is ``swimming underwater and holding your breath.'' The degree to which swimming serves as a metaphor for the act of creation, the ways in which the act of swimming itself liberates the imagination, and the manner in which swimming serves to remove us from the world of everyday concerns, are explored here in 46 stories, poems, and essays. Blossom, a poet herself, has unerring instincts for picking distinctive prose on the subject: The collection includes John Cheever's unsettling story ``The Swimmer''; frank, exact memoirs by the swimmers Diana Nyad and Annette Kellerman; and robust poems by Maxine Kumin (``400 Meter Freestyle''), Anne Sexton (``The Nude Swim''), and Mary Oliver (``The Swimmer''). A fresh idea, well executed.
Pub Date: May 23, 1996
ISBN: 0-88001-449-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996
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