Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems (review)

With Line Drives Brooke Horvath and Tim Wiles have compiled the best anthology of baseball literature since Don Johnson's classic Hummers , Knucklers, and Slow Curves (1991), which they acknowledge as their model. Their aim, though, differs from Johnson's in that they decided to eschew well-known poems already anthologized, such as Donald Hall's "Couplet," about an old-timer's day at Fenway Park, and Robert Francis's gems "The Base Stealer" and "The Pitcher." They also eliminated long poems, which means even excerpts from Hall's "Baseball" and "Extra Innings"—two touchstones of the subgenre—fall beyond their reach. But the editors scouted more than 4,000 possibilities to find their 100 picks, and the great majority of them repay rereading.

Line Drives includes poems by many big names in the world of poetry. Yusef Komunyakaa, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994, contributes "Glory," which depicts laborers who work "knockout shifts daybreak / To sunset six days a week" but on Sundays are "all Jackie Robinson / & Willie Mays" (p.45). On Sundays, "A stolen base or homerun / Would help another man / Survive the new week" (p.46). Equally adept is Andrew Hudgins's "In the Red Seats," a poem less about the game on the field than the experience in the stands. Hudgins narrates how a rowdy drunk edging out of his row blows beer breath in Hudgins's face, then loses his balance: "He teetered, / flailed. I reached out, grabbed / his shoulder" (p.59). The drunk is flooded with love for the man who saves him, but Hudgins can't bear it and in the fifth inning sidles "down packed precipitous / red rows, easing past strangers, / excusing" himself (p.60).

Especially accomplished is Jim Daniels's autobiographical "Polish-American Night, Tiger Stadium." After getting a letter from an old friend, Daniels attempts to understand something of the design of his life. He revisits the memory of a game spent with his friend and a girl who betrayed Daniels later that summer. Recalling that it was in this game that future star reliever John Hiller hurt his knee, Daniels movingly though ambiguously concludes, "maybe that's what / we were just beginning to learn that night, / that it can all come on so suddenly / just by bending your leg the wrong way" (p.66). The poem artfully dovetails the distant life of the Tigers' Hiller with the lives of the fans and evocatively unites them in the image of the final line.

Though the work of other "names" dots the book—Richard Brautigan, Michael Harper, Charles Bukowski, even Dan Quisenberry, whose poem is simple but resonant—the poems that appeal most to both lovers of baseball and lovers of poetry come from journeymen who deserve greater appreciation. Rodney Torreson's "Dreams Should Not Dog Great Center Fielders," reprinted from his stellar volume The Ripening of Pinstripes , poignantly sketches the anguished lives of Mantle and DiMaggio. The poem cleverly plays off its title several times, for instance, near the end when Torreson metaphorically writes, "The dreams of the greats / should be tame, trained / to open and close a gate" (pp.108-9). Other poems vivid in figurative language are David Starkey's "September Pears" and Caron Andregg's "Solid Single." In "September Pears" baseball is the vehicle, the object invoked to compare with rain as well as the fruit: "Hard / as baseballs, / rain soon soaks / their skins" and soon "sweet rot / bloats the fruit / to softball size" (p.74). In Andregg's poem, nicely crafted into asymmetrically balanced stanzas, she imagines the well-hit horsehide ball skipping "off the nap of the close-clipped turf / as if it were still on the horse, jumping fence" and "sailing into new pastures" (p.177).

Too many poems in this fine book reach base...