A Dwindling Body of Ageing Fish

 For several years in the early 1980s, and some more in the late 1980s, I was radio critic for the late lamented Listener. My nominal editor was the genial and very well connected Derwent May, the literary editor, but I had been appointed by the new-broom magazine editor, Russell Twisk, who clearly wanted to shake things up. Though he was cordial enough to me, it was clear that Derwent would sooner have had almost anyone but a young gadfly like me writing the radio column, and who can blame him? He was, anyway, an excellent literary editor, and during his reign at The Listener (he left in 1986 and was succeeded by Lynne Truss) published some very fine poems. As it happens, I have just come across a volume called The Music of What Happens: Poems from The Listener 1965-1980, edited by Derwent May (BBC, 1981), and it's a mighty impressive anthology. It includes, for example, four of Larkin's best, all originally published in the pages of The Listener – 'Cut Grass', 'How Distant', 'The Explosion' and 'The Old Fools'. I fancy I'll be dipping into it quite often, and maybe posting some of the choicer items.
  Stevie Smith was one of May's regulars. In the introduction to the anthology, he recalls that 'Stevie Smith, when she was alive, would send me her new poems neatly typed out, but accompanied often by a torn scrap of paper with a witty, spiky drawing on one side, and a discarded draft of another poem on the back. It was Stevie who told me that the first line of her poem 'Friends of the River Trent' – 'A dwindling body of ageing fish' – was copied from a news item she saw in the Angling Times in a doctor's waiting-room.' And here it is: 

Friends of the River Trent
(at their annual dinner)

A dwindling body of ageing fish
Is all we can present
Because of water pollution
In the River Trent
Because of water pollution, my boys,
And a lack of concerted action,
These fish of what they used to be
Is only a measly fraction
A-swimming about most roomily
Where they shoved each other before,
Yet not beefing about being solitary
Or the sparseness of the fare.
Then three cheers for the ageing fish, my boys,
Content in polluted depths
To grub up enough food, my boys,
To carry 'em to a natural death,
And may we do the same, my boys,
And carry us to a natural death.

That one reminded me of another fishing-related poem with a title plucked from an unlikely source – this one by Kay Ryan:

When Fishing Fails

Your husband is very lucky," observed Smithers,
"to have ornithology to fall back upon when fishing fails."
— Cyril Hare, Death Is No Sportsman

When fishing fails, when no bait avails,
and nothing speaks in liquid hints
of where the fishes went for weeks,
and dimpled ponds and silver creeks
go flat and tarnish, it's nice if
you can finish up your sandwich,
pack your thermos, and ford
this small hiatus towards
a second mild and absorbing purpose.