“Coming to That is the perfect fulfillment of an artistic life—to live very long and deliberately, to maintain a sharp mind and serviceable body, soaking up a multitude of paintings, films, plays, ballets, operas, books, songs, poems (and, yes, champagne) and bringing it to bear on one’s creative endeavors, right to the very end and into the future.”
3 Good Books invites writers & artists to share their favorite books on a given theme.
“There are dozens of good books involving sport fishing, and many of our greatest authors have found in fishing some of life’s happiest and most painful moments,” notes Hughes, who admits difficulty in narrowing his favorite books on fishing. “Chekhov, Yeats, Ted Hughes, Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Annie Proulx, to name but a few, loved to fish and write about it. Among those essayists who write specifically about fishing, I count David James Duncan, Ted Leeson, Marjorie Sandor, and Thomas McGuane as the best.”
“It may, in fact be the most compelling collection of stories on fishing that I’ve ever read. It’s an outstanding mosaic of fishing literature, clearly, carefully selected by editor Henry Hughes…”
This Everyman Library’s Pocket edition, edited by Henry Hughes, is a warm, witty, and wise collection of excellent verse in which some aspect of the angling passion, or some brooding over rivers, arises and plays itself out.
Gival Press is pleased to announce that Henry Hughes has won the 11th Annual Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award-2012 for his poem titled Action. Read Action.
Shutter Lines
From Cloudbank Books: Oregon Book Award-winning poet Henry Hughes journeys with master artist Paul Gentry to explore Oregon and the state of America. They create a conversation that is moving, thoughtful, politically engaging and refreshingly playful
What people are saying about Shutter Lines:
“Henry Hughes is one of the great Northwest poets in top form, and now with Paul Gentry and his extraordinary photographs, we get an amazing, unforgettable collection.” —Willy Vlautin
“Photography, poetry, fiction, film—it’s all the same job—to find the right detail that says it all. The resonant details in Gentry’s photographs have leapt into Hughes’ fine writing, bringing people to life and those lives into sharp focus.” —Christopher Rauschenberg
“I like Steinbeck’s work, always have. America seen from close to the ground, nothing fancy, just real. That’s what I get out of Henry Hughes’ writing. Paul Gentry’s photos beautifully echo this writing—they seem to have a loneliness to them, a quietness, too.” —Rick Bartow
“The collaboration in Shutter Lines is so complete that the photographer has come to work like a poet and the poet like a photographer. This book is innovative, investigative, and insightful.” —David Biespiel
Paul Gentry and Henry Hughes
Henry recently reviewed Ted Leeson’s book, Inventing Montana: Dispatches from the Madison Valley for Harvard Review Online:
Ted Leeson makes the disclaimer that he is just a “seasonal resident” who for over twenty years has spent several weeks every summer living above and fishing the Madison River in southwest Montana. “And if my familiarity with the place runs only skin-deep, I am satisfied, for it is our skins that wrap us in sensation.” Leeson’s distance, humility, acute sensitivity and tail-flipping wit make Inventing Montana a fresh, humorous, and insightful book on a region that is reverently fished, camped, explored, and over-described. “Montana” is, after all, just “a word that closes distances, a name for a curved roof of sky and a place fashioned beneath it.”
Click to read the full review.
“Collecting poetry from around the world, Hughes has assembled an anthology that not only portrays the differences of various fishing cultures, but of particular eras, whether it be ancient China or present day America.”
Hiram Poetry Review’s full review of The Art of Angling: Poems about Fishing
“Frank O’Hara’s call for poetry “better than the movies” suggests qualities of movement, vividness, clarity and music: a high standard, met by the poems of Moist Meridian. It won’t do to exaggerate the cinematic quality of the poems, with their flashes of narrative, rapid cuts, crisp dialogue, fresh characters; the kind of thinking and the language are those of a poet— and distinctively reflective poet. The compression and swift varying of mood are those of poetry, as in the opening sentence-fragment of “Black Walnuts,”: little charred brains/ on November streets, where folks from Hope House/ lurch and bump, run rain-suited/ down to Rick’s Coffee and the market,/ over-greeting the kind and idle.” Alertness, generosity, irony and candor govern these poems, which are endlessly curious about the relations among people, with sex, friendship, marriage and alienation examples of an abiding, fearful but engaging mystery. An engaging, uneasy and clear-sighted book.”
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