At first glance, the author and subject of this unusual memoir seem an unlikely pair of friends. Boyanowsky is a Simon Fraser University psychology professor, while Ted Hughes (who died in 1998) was Britain’s poet laureate. They met in 1986 when the latter gave a reading at SFU. Discovering that they were both anglers, they began taking fishing trips together to the Dean River, 450 kilometres northwest of Vancouver, stalking what Boyanowsky refers to as the “mystical” and “ghostlike” steelhead. (Although a prolific contributor to piscatorial journals and the author of The Pocket Guide to Fly Fishing for Steelhead, Boyanowsky tells us next to nothing about the fish themselves.)

Boyanowsky’s descriptions of Hughes’s numerous fishing expeditions (and poetry readings) in B.C. give a quick but insightful picture of the poet. They show him, in contrast to many other people’s impressions, as warm and polite. So polite that, when dragged to a notorious Vancouver strip club, he good-naturedly hails the dancers as “so much more elegant and feminine than I recall from my youth in England, in the army, where the setting was not so prepossessing [nor] the women so lissom.” But there are also hints of Hughes’s notoriously chilly side. When Boyanowsky’s marriage breaks up, the only comfort Hughes can muster is decidedly cold: “When one lives with wolves, one must be a wolf.”

Obviously the two men enjoyed a complex friendship. Boyanowsky writes, “The literature in my field of social psychology concludes that, very often, caring for someone of some eminence inculcates a distancing resentment, or at least a perfunctory expectation on their part. Less frequently, it cements an almost familiar relationship.” Such was obviously the case here. Elsewhere he writes: “I understand how women, and men too, fall in love with Hughes, shy as he is, for once he gives of himself, he holds nothing back. The listener is thrilled to be privy to the creative process.”

Boyanowsky’s style often flirts with the baroque, but his book is a generally illuminating look at an unusual friendship.