Savage Gods, Silver Ghosts: In the Wild with Ted Hughes

Fishing in B.C.'s wilderness fuels the bonds of friendship between Ehor Boyanowsky and literary giant Ted Hughes.

They met at a poetry reading, but became friends through their shared, and unquenchable, passion for fishing. Against the backdrop of the Dean River, one of the world's greatest steelhead rivers, the two men explored their mutual regard for the planet's wild places. Boyanowsky draws on personal correspondence, interviews and journal entries to recreate their encounters and to paint an intimate portrait of a lifelong outdoorsman, conservationist and artist.

The book also goes behind the creative process as fishing logs transmute into poetry, talk becomes action and the queen's bard composes bawdy verse on the drive to a stag party. Boyanowsky realizes he's been privileged to see a Hughes who is different from the public persona.

In these tales of male friendship and the primal act of fly-fishing, the reader gets glimpses of the "nature red in tooth and claw" that drew Ted Hughes to Canada, and rekindled his love of the natural world.