Portrait of the Artist as Fly Fisher

He describes a river:

The spate had a channel from the high heather
to the estuary and its runway of water
where running salmon crowded like memories.

He describes the run of fish:

It was hard to think that these stale pools
could host the urgent passage of warriors from the sea.

Here's a fancy ending to a poem entitled "A Discovery" which is sure to warm the heart of the postmodern nerd.

I held my pace steady in my aloneness
and never looked back until now, to revise
that favourite valley into a stage for eyes
and to realize how happily I walked
into the script of my own occasion.

And later in the same book a choice bit of dialogue or a bit of reported speech of Poppy with her interlocutor Harry (though he remains silent and likely smiling) … an occasion in a sequence devoted to the art of angling and to capturing the nuances of a landscape.

'Harry, have you taken my stuff again
for those flies of yours, have you?'
So she chided him in good humour.

'You'd better catch some trout next time!'

The red fly was christened Poppy's Fancy
and it proved successful that year
in Spring for brown trout.

All these glittering bits captured from Seán Lysaght The Mouth of A River.

And so for day 1581
12.04.2011