Stealing Home: Baseball Poems by Dwayne Brenna (review)

Known professionally for his work on stage, television, and cinema, Dwayne Brenna should—with this collection of poems celebrating the great American pastime—also now be known as a poet and baseball enthusiast. For with this collection of poems, Brenna demonstrates both his deep love and appreciation for the game as well as a (largely) nuanced ear for language.

Brenna’s background in acting likely provided him with one of the strengths of this collection, namely an ability to write from multiple personae. Although some of these poems, set as they are in Saskatchewan, are likely drawn from personal experience (if not directly biographical), other poems speak with a more universal voice, one that allows the reader to imagine himself both in the poem as well as in the game. For anyone who has ridden the pine, for instance, “Chatter” will bring back warm memories of encouraging one’s team and trying to rattle your opponents. In fact, all of the poems in section three (“Hard Ball”) work to bring the game to life; those who have played will be able to relate, and those who have not are given a keen insight into some of the game’s subtle nuances. Poems like “Curve Ball” and “Split Finger,” to note but two examples, operate simultaneously as introductions to the uninitiated to “the curve’s impossibility” and the pitch that “no one hits,” as well as familiar reminders to players who have stood in the batter’s box. However, it’s in poems like “Knuckleball” that Brenna demonstrates his facilities as a poet; spacing his stanzas so that they “[dance] like a Broadway chorus girl,” Brenna’s poem mimics the frustrating beauty of this pitch.

In addition to his wonderful work exploring the details of the game, Brenna’s collection also taps into baseball’s important work as a cultural marker, a bridge between generations, and the bonds we share with others though our participation (particularly the father/son bond, a common trope in various baseball books and movies). “Cheats,” for instance, illuminates a lesson that fathers must give their sons about growing up: learning “to cheat when I was twelve,” the speaker’s father puts his arm around his son’s shoulders and sagely tells him, “The umpire calls the game, not you” In a similar vein, “WinnWell” is a short meditation on loss, and a reminder of the various ways we remember our fathers through the game of baseball: “When fathers die, you lose / a little more of them each day. / Now I’ve lost the smell of leather / and the oil he used, / his hand print in the glove.” And in poems such as “Funeral” (the finest of the collection, in this reviewer’s estimation), Brenna presents lyric moments of intimacy woven together with details drawn from a lifetime spent playing the game: mourning the loss of a thirty-year coach and umpire (“Steeee! he growled and Baaaawwrr! and sometimes Faauooooh!”), the coffin bearers “hoist him on [their] shoulders like [they] never did, / his casket seeming lighter than he was.”

Brenna also demonstrates that the game is played by people, and not just living collections of statistics and probabilities, as “We are not numbers or geometry; / the essence of our struggle / doesn’t square,” from “Stats and the Great Players,” reminds the reader. Similarly, though we may all remember the giants of the game, Brenna reminds us of the many who have become little more than footnotes to those stars: the aptly-titled “Footnote” asks “what of poor old Wally Pipp?,” a player whose claim to fame is as “a footnote / in the legend of another man.” “There were no movies made about his life,” and he will forever be remembered as the man who wasn’t Lou Gehrig. Nor, as other poems point out, are the uniformed players the only participants in this sport: “Scully” is a touching ode to one of the finest play-by-play announcers in professional sports, and readers who...