A Place on the Water: An Angler's Reflections on Home - Softcover

Dennis, Jerry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312141270 ISBN 13: 9780312141271

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 1996

Synopsis

More than a collection of fishing stories, A Place on the Water is a passionate and eloquent exploration of subjects with broad appeal: love of land and water, informed and unsentimental appreciation of nature, and outrage at changes that threaten to obliterate places we can no longer afford to take for granted. In clear and sparkling prose, Jerry Dennis transports us to a world that every angler dreams of-where the very next cast will be the one that hooks something enormous and wonderful.

About this title

About the Author:

Jerry Dennis, author of It's Raining Frogs and Fishes, is a frequent contributor of essays, articles, and short fiction to many of the leading outdoor and nature publications in the United States. He lives in Traverse City, Michigan.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Pleasant essays--five of which won first-prize awards from the Outdoor Writers Association of America--on a youth spent fishing and canoeing the lakes and rivers of northern Michigan, by Dennis (It's Raining Frogs and Fishes, 1992--not reviewed). Having grown up in the 1960's in the vicinity of Michigan's Silver and Long lakes and Au Sable and Boardman rivers, Dennis is able to write of waters once teeming with fish but now barren--and, happily, of once-barren waters now full of fish. He seems to have done a lot of his fishing at night, claiming that nocturnal angling offers ``your best hope of deceiving a large brown trout with an artificial fly.'' In one piece, he and his teenage buddies jump a fence in the dark of night to fish a string of farm ponds in the middle of a pasture filled with grazing buffalo. In others, like ``A New-Moon Bass'' and ``Night Paddling,'' Dennis recalls fishing with his father and floating ``through the darkness on muggy summer nights.'' In 1970, he tells us, he observed hundreds of lake trout circling hypnotically in the glow of dock lights. Though a pilgrimage to the Fox River (Hemingway's model for ``Big Two- Hearted River'') disappoints him, Dennis is pleased to meet Robert Traver, the late author of Anatomy of a Murder. Traver, a former state supreme court justice, delights Dennis by taking him into the back woods to his favorite fishing hole. Dennis also hunts for a legendary huge ``old brown'' living in a dark, still pool of the Boardman. He never catches the fish, but, as he notes, ``catching a trout like that isn't the point. The point, of course, is believing that he's there.'' Smooth, with a gently impressionistic touch--like easy- listening radio for anglers. (Line illustrations--some seen) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0312141270
• ISBN 13: 9780312141271
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240