ELY GOOD IDEA

For as long as there’s been Miscellany, there has been a mantra oft-repeated round our hallowed halls: ‘There’s a book in everything.’

Back then it was fuelled by the spate of one-word-title creative non-fiction, telling a wider history through a deceptively narrow perspective. Mark Kurlansky’s

Cod comes to mind as sparking the genre, although it seemed barely a month went by without a new title exploring humanity through the history of toilets.

That trend may have somewhat abated but the message persists: there really is a book in everything, if you find the right angle and write well, and inspiration can come from the most unusual of places.

The latest book to remind us of the notion (and that we really should start making some notes on that long-awaited history of the Rhubarb Triangle – a public awaits), is an eighty-page poem published by Sheffield independents Longbarrow Press, The European Eel, which grew from innovative research into the critically endangered fish and consultation with scientists, conservationists and academics, to create a work which ‘although a poem first and foremost [is] a highly credible and informed piece of nature writing’.

The poem is based around the imagined life-cycle and migration of an eel, caught and released by the author in Frickley Beck, South Yorkshire, through a series of rivers to the North Sea and, ultimately to where it was first spawned in the Sargasso Sea. In addition to a certain nominative determinism, Dr Steve Ely, senior lecturer in creative writing at Huddersfield University, was drawn to the subject by the enigmatic gaps in our knowledge of the fish, and expands his canvas to consider broader ecological issues and our place in the Sixth Extinction.

‘Fish biologists seek to fill the dark gaps in the eel’s still little-known life story via research,’ he says. ‘In

The European Eel, I build on that research, but allow myself the luxury of speculation and imaginative reconstruction.’

If only fishing for ideas always came so easily.