The Gym is Locked

March Madness is now a phrase identifying a month of celebrations and defeats, with words such as monumental and heartbreak headlining sports pages across America. I am sure that somewhere a journalist dons King Lear’s mantle to write of “who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out.” Hoosiers and That Championship Season enrich our national sports narrative. We love winners and quickly forget losers, unless we are Jack Ridl, whose poetry collection, Losing Season, spotlights a team and a community mired in a winter of such discontent that even the snow falls “like losses settling along / the windowsill.”

A number of anthologies (e.g., Motion: American Sports Poems and This Sporting Life) remind us that periodicals have offered excellent sports poems for years, but few publishers blend a collection into their prose sports series. CavanKerry Press, noted for its support of new and established poets (not sports publishing), selected Ridl’s volume for its Notable Voices series. The author of four books of poetry, three chapbooks, and several textbooks, Ridl is a mature writer with a rich knowledge of basketball (his father was a hall-of-fame coach), but also a sophisticated understanding of sport as a universal subject.

The Wilson High Comets begin their season with the usual high expectations, but quickly fall to a two and nine record, followed by ten straight losses. Coach Daniels laments, cajoles, whines, but stands steadfast against imminent small-town dissection, barbershop deconstruction, and a cast of over thirty characters whose lives are tied to this team by an unclipped cord. Jim Kenner is one of them: “he’d dreamed / of staying here in his hometown / and opening a store.” He did that, and he “loved the games: came early, sat in / the same seat, screamed, ‘Deeeee- / fense.’” One day he told the coach, “I hate busted plays, bad calls, and / after every game we lose, I swear / I’ll sell the store, never see another / game, move to Florida, just quit.” Was Kenner one of those, at the end of the season, who hanged the coach in effigy?

Each of the sixty-five poems is a discrete vignette, and the book is divided into four quarters (as in a basketball game), but story and time are governed more by the entanglements of past, present, and future within a harsh season. Winter collapses the gym’s dome, a dog freezes, Scrub dreams of getting off the bench, Ex-Cheerleader remembers her own firm body in a mirror, Coach imagines visiting a losers’ hall-of-fame, one of the former great players comes back for a visit, Star’s mother hopes her son’s grades are good enough to get him out of here, Coach tells his team, “We stink,” and the odor pervades the whole town. Wilson, like Hickory in Hoosiers, is a struggling, gossipy, limited, passionate, entirely human place where a season of basketball disturbs its most troubling impulses.

Yet the book’s richness does not inhere in its naturalistic framework or accessible style, engaging as both are for this now familiar subject of a small town and its sports team. I am sure many readers will be content with poetry that reads like a novel. But Ridl is not one-dimensional, and like the author of Dubliners he has unified his story in a more subtle way. Symbols abound in the book, and they are sufficiently connected to provide an insight into Ridl’s own version of what James Joyce proposed for his work: “My intention,” said Joyce, “was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis.”

The citizens of Ridl’s town are paralyzed by what the Equipment Manager terms “a life filled with repairs”: broken dreams that hold them to their youth, fears of breaking out of routines, and that ever-present, inert state of mind that says, with Coach, “Couldn’t we go...