(HOST) It’s been said that watching a trout rise to a well-cast fly on a Vermont stream is pure poetry. Poet John Engels thought so – and often wrote about it. Engels died recently, and commentator Tom Slayton has this appreciation.
(SLAYTON) I can’t think of anyone who wrote poetry as incisive, layered, and evocative about the sport of fly fishing as John Engels. He wrote poems that focused on many other subjects besides fly fishing – love, death, memory and the beautiful complexities of living. But some of his best poems were about that arcane, very difficult, very beautiful sport, and when he wrote about it, his poems were filled with echoes. Echoes of love, death, memory, and the beautiful complexities of fishing – which for Engels was a large part of what being truly alive meant.
I just reread one of his last collections of poems. It’s called Big Water, and is a remarkable book, packed with the beloved images and memories of a lifetime’s worth of fly-fishing. And packed also with the many deeper meanings that fishing can evoke.
Big Water is a book about fly-fishing, to be sure. But it is also, unequivocally, a book about the poet’s impending death. Well, for that matter about all of our deaths, impending or not. Images and symbols of mortality repeatedly find their way into John Engels’s poems. They can be as painful as his vision of a bullhead gasping and squeaking for air.
Or they can be wonderfully subtle – as in the poem “Gutting Bluefish,” a meditation on life and death by the ocean in which a flock of big gulls swarm onto the bluefish guts that a poet has just dumped on an ocean-side rock. The bright, late-afternoon light is so luminous, so “young,” the poet says,
“I almost doubt the prospect
of darkness to follow,
and so go on
trying to look to where
the sea has become
not clearly itself,
to where it continually vanishes
behind the black headland”.
Images that make us think of mortality and death surface in several other poems, such as “Mudtrapped,” – where the poet hopes against hope that death may be balanced by love – but ultimately fears that
“Love’s natural buoyancies
are no true balance to the pulling-down.”
Never-the-less, there’s plenty of life and life’s complexity in John Engel’s work. The pure joy of fishing is reflected in almost all the poems in “Big Water,” no matter what else they may convey. And his memories of his friends and family and the many years he spent fishing as a boy resonate with a multi-layered beauty.
John Engels died last month after a long life. He had received many honors for his poetry – fellowships from almost all the major foundations and from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1996, he won the Ralph Nading Hill Literary Prize, from Vermont Life and Green Mountain Power, for a poem entitled “My Grandma Mourning” that went beyond nostalgia to evoke the hard reality of life in an earlier, simpler Vermont.
John Engels’ passing is a loss, but he has left a body of published poems that will continue to delight and enlighten all who love the natural world as long as waters flow and trout rise.
Tom Slayton is editor-emeritus of Vermont Life magazine.