Even Brook Trout Get the Blues

Behind the sardonic, hip titles of Gierach's fly-fishing travelogues ( Trout Bum ; Sex, Death and Fly-Fishing ) lurk grace, passion and wit--even angling epiphanies. Assembled here are 16 lively essays on his Rocky Mountain home streams, farm ponds, dogs and the peculiarity of fishing companions. Every Gierach story, while loaded with lore, is finally about trying to fit the odd but compelling perspectives that fishing bestows into accepted conventions of 20th-century sanity. In a funny, self-reflective mode that owes much to the writings of Richard Brautigan and Tom McGuane, Gierach highlights the fly fisher's single-minded devotion to the sport, with its elements of art, to suggest that the eccentricity is a very real wisdom: ``That is why we like to wander around the mountains with expensive flyrods: to get a taste of things the way they really are.'' His reflections persuade as they entertain. (May)