Tips for Literary Anglers

ANY DEDICATED FLY FISHER looks for tips on how to improve. Fortunately, there’s a long tradition of experts giving advice, as I was reminded while reading Raymond Carver’s final book, A New Path to the Waterfall (1989), where salmon, sturgeon, bass, and brook trout all figure in the poems.

Carver grew up in the Pacific Northwest. He began chasing salmon at an early age and never tired of it. The endpapers pay tribute with a tapestry of leaping spawners. When Carver settled in Port Angeles, Wash., he enjoyed a view of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and kept a sixteen-foot salmon boat in the harbor. His biggest catch was a thirty-two-pounder during the local Salmon Derby, although he claimed, as we all do, that he’d lost a couple at least that big.