A master angler throwing flies
No Lines in Nature
by Joe Enns
Nanoose Bay: Joe Enns, 2025
$17.00 / 9781069299918
Reviewed by Harold Rhenisch
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Joe Enns sure knows how to cast a fly.
The list of fly fishers in British Columbia is long. Casting flies has been poetry here since long before literature arrived in the pockets of men like Bliss Carmen, Earl Birney, and Ralph Gustafson and women like P.K. Page and Lorna Crozier.
Those two traditions come together in this book. And that’s a pleasant surprise. The list of anglers in British Columbia who could also cast a line of verse is much shorter. Roderick Haig Brown is one. As a young man, he snuck out of logging shows in the 1920s to lure salmon out of the Quinsum and the Campbell. After writing many poetic books about a life spent making art for fish, he received the Governor General’s Award in 1958. Perhaps the fish were on the jury.
To complete this metaphor, Rod’s fishing buddies, including his wife Anne and his neighbour Van Eagan, no lesser poets of river and fish, never carried their art over into verse. In 2009, I interviewed Van for the first Haig Brown Memorial Lecture. With the Campbell River smashing rocks together just a footstep outside his window, I asked why he continued to live alone at 93 years of age, despite his daughter begging him to move close to her down island. He answered simply and poetically, “Sometimes, you just become the river.”
As British Columbian heirs of a long ecological tradition, we are fortunate that Van and Rod and Ann became that river. Joe Enns stands now where they once stood, casting out.
Another heir to Haig-Brown’s English-Cascadian tradition was the work poet and historian Charles Lillard. To write about fly fishing, he riffed on an English classic, Isaac Walton’s The Complete Angler. “It was more about poetry than fly fishing,” he said. For Charles, who worked his way down to Victoria from logging shows on the Alaskan coast, poetry and hard physical work in the wilderness were closely bound.
A contributor to BCR, Enns stands in his boots—and fills them. As part of the poetic practice that is his life, Enns is a fisheries biologist. To honour that practical side of his life, he has included proud work poems here, honouring that attention and the people he shares it with in the work of sustaining salmon in Osoyoos Lake and sturgeon on the Fraser River. He stands easily in this other dynamic British Columbian tradition, answering the call of other great work poets such as M.C. Warrior, Pete Trower, Kate Braid, Tom Wayman, and Lorne Dufour.
B.C’s other great angler poet, D.C. Reid, had a long career writing both practically and evocatively about fishing: poems, essays, handbooks and newspaper articles. He claims to know every river and stream from Jordan River to Cape Scott and to have fished them with bears, often catching the same steelhead, old enemies by this point, year after year. I think Enns was there. His No Lines in Nature contains an image of a fly fisher glimpsed working the water in a deep river canyon. It could well be Reid.
So, let’s welcome Enns as a new master poet to this tradition of fisher poets. Like the others he is a master at throwing a line—in his case, literally. At their best, the lines of his verse are exquisite casts. The poems through which they flash, stream, curl, and bend are pools of still water. Heart, mind, and world merge into attention.
Enns is the river. The river even speaks through his mouth. Listen to its chop in “One Tim Hortons Cup Per Hour”:
Waves pounded the gunwales. The camp-
site, two men beached their boat and said, Leaks one
Tim Hortons cup per hour. Idling Dodge Ram
charged their battery with jumper cable clamps.
Spoken like a river that’s darned good with a brush and a palette knife, I’d say. (Enns is also a painter. These poems are riverscapes.)
Sometimes, Enns stresses a line, such as in “The Weight of Winter”:
Snow floats through metal
railing spindles revealing
unseen spiderwebs.
Sometimes, he stresses a fly, such as in “Twisted Leashes”:
Gnats come out every time
I water the house plants
They orbit my face
As I write and I grab
The air with a fist.
That fly, that fist grasping air, lands perfectly on its pool, and does so with keen, startling humour, too. Effects like this were long championed by the Canadian Master of the wry non sequitur, Dave McFadden. Now they are in Enns’ tackle box, too.
And that’s the thing. It is one of the pleasures of reading a first book of poems (as this is), to watch a poet put on the shirt of his ancestors for the first time. Enns does it again and again, with one approach after another. Who knows where all this apprenticeship might lead, but the fit with McFadden shows great promise.
Not all of Enns’ attempts to fill the shirts of his poetic ancestors land well. Sometimes, such as in the ghazal “Windfall,” he ties a heavy lure on a line and it lands in chop with a heavy splash. Every couplet of “Windfall” ends in “enough,” but the turn in meaning after six casts is not enough to land the spoon in a fish’s eye (or my ear). These moments are rare, but their presence does give an episodic flavour to reaches of the book. That is, its flow is at times more a collection of explorations (and tangled line hung up in branches) than the river they bushwhack down to and try to map.
Only sometimes, though. The long title section, “No Lines in Nature,” a thirteen-page long bravura jazz performance, never wavers. It could easily have been a book on its own. The craft and music in this section is exquisite.
In a subtle echo of Ezra Pound’s continuously inventive renditions of the Songs of Confucius, or Keith Jarrett’s legendary Sun Bear concerts, the poem reimagines its form in every stanza, riffing on the 1-2 and 1-2-3 patterns of a fisher throwing line far out onto a stream. Enns does not get tangled in the trees on the far shore here but lands lightly in the eye of the water each time.
Here is the master casting:
I teach myself to paint. YouTube videos.
Magazines. If I could paint the human
figure, I could paint anything. Skin
tone is complicated. Errors are obvious.
The slide of “videos,” “magazines,” and “obvious” across the steady beat of “paint” on a canvas of quick “n” brush strokes is gorgeous. And every stanza explores a different pattern! Look at this one mirror itself like rippling water after line 2:
I snorkel the lake shallows. Abandoned
iron rails. Clay banks. Underwater piles
of stones. Two garter snakes swim. Dull
umber bodies dive and pick out a sculpin.
Isn’t that grand? I could watch Joe Enns throw line in his river canyon all day.
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[Harold Rhenisch has written thirty-five books from the Southern Interior since 1974. He won the George Ryga Prize for a memoir, The Wolves at Evelyn. His other grasslands books are Tom Thompson’s Shack and Out of the Interior. He lived for fifteen years in the South Cariboo and worked closely with photographer Chris Harris on Spirit in the Grass, Motherstone, Cariboo Chilcotin Coast, and The Bowron Lakes; and he writes the blog Okanagan-Okanogan. Harold lives in an old Japanese orchard on unceded Syilx Territory above Canim Bay on Okanagan Lake. [Editor’s note: Harold has recently reviewed books by Tom Wayman, Estlin McPhee, Al Rempel, Hari Alluri, Brian Day, Jason Emde, John Givins, DC Reid, Kim Trainor, Dallas Hunt, and Tim Bowling for BCR. His newest book, The Salmon Shanties, was reviewed by Steven Ross Smith.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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