Five Poetry Collections that Hunters and Anglers Should Read

I can already see the skepticism in your scrunched face as you read this byline. It’s the same look I get when I tell anyone that I write poetry. Unless you read it in your spare time or pursued a degree in English literature, you probably have preconceived (and incorrect) notions about what exactly poetry is.

Most folks immediately think of Shakespeare, hard end rhymes, and unrequited love, or the clichéd Pinterest poems that everyone from your grandmother to your melodramatic teenage sister shares online. But like music, poetry has many genres, themes, and subject matters—and that includes hunting. Some of it’s good, a lot of it’s bad. The best transcends time and culture.

If you enjoy reading articles and non-fiction pieces about hunting, angling, and conservation, then I encourage you to give poetry a try. You might not know where to start, so I’ve included a list of poetry collections with poets who tend to write about hunting, angling, or the natural world. No, this is not an exhaustive list by any means, but it’s a good starting place.

You have to keep in mind that poetry, unlike prose, operates under different rules. Will it read like a traditional narrative? Maybe, maybe not. Will you “get it” by the end? That depends on how you read it or what you expect to gain. Even if you just want another creative way to think about hunting, the natural world, and conservation, then I’d say it’s well worth it.

Making Certain It Goes On: The Collected Poems of Richard Hugo, Richard Hugo

Born in Seattle (1923), Richard Hugo should be on the reading lists of all Westerners, especially all Montanans. Although he’s not traditionally considered a nature poet, Hugo wrote a lot about the American West. He taught for 18 years at the University of Montana, and much of his work addresses rural life, vast landscapes, and a heavy dosage of trout.

Prior to teaching at UM, Hugo served as a bombardier in WWII, where he flew several missions over the Mediterranean. Later, after working as a technical writer at Boeing, Hugo, along with his wife at the time, quit their jobs and expatriated to Italy. While there, Hugo revisited the places where he dropped bombs during his time in the war and wrote about those experiences in his collection Good Luck in Cracked Italian.

While you won’t find traditional hard end rhymes in Hugo’s work, his poems have a rhythmic quality and plenty of end, slant, or internal rhyme throughout them. I haven’t found a Hugo poem that I don’t like, but here are a few of my favorites.

Notable Poems: “Bass,” “Approaching the Castle,” “Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg”

Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, David Bottoms

Anyone unfamiliar with poetry should find David Bottoms’ first collection both moving and accessible. Bottoms paints clear narratives, often from the point of view of a speaker who finds themselves in bars, backroads, baseball games, or the winding and transcendent rivers of the South.

If you think poetry is reserved for high culture, the title alone should convince you otherwise. While Bottoms’ work often evokes rural southern life, it transcends regional boundaries. Whether you live near the big woods of Maine or a mountain town in Wyoming, you should recognize “the darkness we’re headed for” in the book’s titular poem.

Like Hugo, Bottoms' work doesn’t scream nature writer, but his poems are inextricably connected to the natural world. In fact, this collection opens through the lens of the “Drunk Hunter” who stumbles into the “deeper woods” and eventually becomes part of it, albeit in death.

Notable Poems: “Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump,” “The Catfish,” “Hunting on Sweetwater Creek”

The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, Wendell Berry

I could have dedicated an entire article to Wendell Berry alone. The poet, essayist, novelist, and conservationist wrote about buying local and homesteading long before droves of crunchy moms decided it was cool. Berry might not write as much about hunting and fishing, at least not from a traditional sense, but his agrarian values and longstanding advocacy for flourishing, tight-knit communities remain more relevant now than ever.

His emphasis on local life, community, and farming, as opposed to large-scale, corporate agriculture, should appeal to all landowners interested in wildlife management, regardless of size. Berry captures these ideologies in perhaps his most famous collection of essays, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, which I’d encourage you to also read.

Berry is the author of more than 50 books of poetry, so it’s hard to pin a single collection. That’s why I recommend The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, which offers a survey of his work, handpicked by the author himself. Anyone who claims to love conservation should have an appreciation for Berry’s vast collection of poems.

Notable Poems: “The Fearfulness of Hands That Have Learned Killing,” “Before Dark,” “The Peace of Wild Things”

Trophic Cascade, Camille Dungy

Camille Dungy’s poems embody the reality that nothing is separate from nature. Her 2017 collection Trophic Cascade captures this through poems that use imagery of the natural world to depict everything from motherhood to death, painting sometimes grim yet honest depictions of the world as she sees it—a world where we are inseparable from nature.

Her work is accessible and visceral. Dungy’s poem “After Birth” not only turns a great pun on its head but captures the “animalistic” qualities of motherhood, ripe with “mouths to feed and flanks to warm” with “…winter coming on.” She depicts life “after birth” as the inherent, natural struggle of motherhood. If that’s not badass, I don’t know what you call it.

Notable Poems: “After Birth,” “Trophic Cascade,” “Glacial Erratics”

Echolocation, Sage Marshall

Contributor for MeatEater and author Sage Marshall tackles the inherent and inescapable brutality of life in his debut collection Echolocation. These revelations unfold through many of his hunting poems (“Hunting Scene” 1-5) but also in poems about family, hockey, gardening, and a variety of landscapes.

While Marshall’s poems contain narrative threads, they’re often presented through truncated sentences without regular punctuation. These fragmented images read and unfold quickly, much like the act of echolocating (as the title suggests). If you’ve appreciated Marshall’s work here at MeatEater or other outlets, then I highly recommend this collection.

Notable Poems: “Thursday in May,” “Aversion Training,” “Hunting Scene 1,”

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