Hummers, Knucklers, and Slow Curves: CONTEMPORARY BASEBALL POEMS

by Don Johnson (Editor)

Offers eighty-four poems written over the past four decades describing baseball's rich and varied forms.

Genres: Poetry, Baseball

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Librarian Note: There are more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I intentionally started reading this slim-as-the-Splendid-Splinter volume in April (start of the season), took a bit of a hiatus (dog-days of summer) and finished last night, shortly after the second Wild Card game was over (postseason). The poems—a few written by famous writers, such as Richard Hugo, John Updike and Robert Penn Warren—celebrate all manifestations of baseball, from backyard games to the pros, and everything in between, inside and outside the foul poles.

I especially appreciated the poems written by women, as most seemed to reflect my own experiences. Perhaps, for my taste, a few too many poems concerned the Yankees; but even I have to admit those are not really about the Pinstripers, but (same as with the non-Yankees poems) about our relationships with family, friends, beauty, history, the inevitability of death, and dreaming.

*

The Double Play
Robert Wallace (b. 1932)

In his sea-lit
distance, the pitcher winding
like a clock about to chime comes down with

the ball, hit
sharply, under the artificial
bank of lights, bounds like a vanishing string

over the green
to the shortstop magically
scoops to his right whirling above his invisible

shadows
in the dust redirects
its flight to the running poised second baseman

pirouettes
leaping, above the slide, to throw
from mid-air, across the colored tightened interval,

to the leaning-
out first baseman ends the dance
drawing it disappearing into his long brown glove

stretches. What
is too swift for deception
is final, lost, among the loosened figures

jogging off the field
(the pitcher walks), casual
in the space where the poem has happened.

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-do...

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

These poems focus on what baseball means in every form we experience it, from backyard games of catch to the Major Leagues. Those elements of the game lending itself to the creation of myth is celebrated rather than legends and heroes themselves. Most of these poems are about baseball's hold on ordinary folk. Always present are the parallels between the game and life, the reliance on ritual, the importance of its beginnings in spring and its growth through the summer. Gail Mazur says in a poem entitled "Baseball": "The game of baseball is not a metaphor/and I know it's not really life." Later she says "...this is not a microcosm,/not even a slice of life." But her poem is about life and the lives of people measured in terms of the game, its successes, failures, and situations between the foul lines. All these poems demonstrate in various ways that baseball can be seen to reflect the lives we lead and most of the truths we steer those lives by. We're familiar with how fictional representations of the game make analogies to life and its redemptive properties. These wonderful poems are fueled by the same values, nostalgia, ane philosophical heft. But the mixture is richer by language sweeping like curves and insight coming at you high and tight.