Edited Collections
River Poems
Rivers were the arteries of our first civilizations—the Tigris and Euphrates of Mesopotamia, India’s Ganges, Egypt’s Nile, the Yellow River of China—and have nourished modern cities from London to New York, so it’s natural that poets have for centuries drawn essential meanings and metaphors from their endless currents.
In this collection, British poets from Shakespeare and Wordsworth to Ted Hughes and Alice Oswald mingle with American voices ranging from verses by the indigenous Klallam people and the African-American spirituals “Deep River” and “Roll, Jordan, Roll” to such recent poets as Gary Snyder, Mary Oliver, and Natasha Tretheway. Walt Whitman’s iconic “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and Emily Dickinson’s tersely erotic “My River Runs to Thee” stream alongside poems from ancient Babylon and Egypt. Contributions from India, Nepal, Japan, China, Thailand, France, Germany, Russia, Serbia, Chile, Mexico, the Congo, and Nigeria round out this celebration of the rivers of the world.
River Poems is available at Amazon and Random House
Fishing Stories
Fishing Stories nets an abundant catch of wonderful writing in a wide variety of genres and styles. The moods range from the rollicking humor of Rudyard Kipling’s “On Dry-Cow Fishing as a Fine Art” and the rural gothic of Annie Proulx’s “The Wer-Trout” to the haunting elegy of Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It.”
Whether set against the open ocean or tiny mountain streams, in ancient China, tropical Tahiti, Paris under siege, or the vast Canadian wilderness, these stories cast wide and strike deep into the universal joys, absurdities, insights, and tragedies of life.
Fishing Stories is available at Amazon and Random House
The Art of Angling: Poems about Fishing
The Art of Angling offers a bountiful catch of poems from around the world and through the ages on every aspect of the beloved sport.
Fishing has inspired a wealth of poetry—Tang Dynasty meditations; Japanese haiku; medieval rhymes; classic verses by Homer and Shakespeare; poems by Donne, Goethe, Tennyson, and Yeats. Modern masterpieces abound as well, by the likes of Federico García Lorca, Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes, Robert Lowell, Raymond Carver, Margaret Atwood, Audre Lorde, Richard Hugo, and Derek Walcott. In the hands of the poets collected here, fishing with a hook and line yields reflections both sparklingly light and awe-inspiringly deep. Filled with humor, nostalgia, adventure, celebrations of the beauties of nature, and metaphors for the art of living, The Art of Angling is sure to lure anglers and lovers of poetry alike.
Art of Angling was selected as “One the Eleven Fishing Books Every Angler Should Read” by https://gearjunkie.com/best-fishing-books.
The Art of Angling: Poems about Fishing is available at Amazon and Random House.
River Stories
From the ancient Nile to the sacred Ganges to the mighty Mississippi—the rivers of the world wind through this collection of stories from the world’s great writers.
River gods and nymphs frolic in Ovid’s mythic telling. The trickster Coyote reroutes a river in a Native American tale. A set of stone steps at the shore of the Ganges bears witness to heartbreak in Rabindranath Tagore’s “The River Stairs,” and Mark Twain floats his rebellious heroes on a raft to freedom. Kenneth Grahame’s Rat and Mole explore their local waterway in a rowboat, and Ernest Hemingway’s war-weary veteran finds peace while catching trout.
From The Wind in the Willows to Huckleberry Finn, from Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” to Alice Munro’s “The Found Boat” and Zadie Smith’s “The Lazy River,” the tales collected here—by such luminaries as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Guy de Maupassant, E. M. Forster, Hermann Hesse, Zora Neale Hurston, Cormac McCarthy, Elif Shafak, and many more—set moving scenes against the backdrop of moving waters, in testament to the enduring power of rivers in the human imagination.
Everyman’s Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases, with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.
River Stories is available on Amazon