Line Drives

Line Drives

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SKU: 9780809324408
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“We wait for baseball all winter long,” Bill Littlefield wrote in Boston Magazine a decade ago, “or rather, we remember it and anticipate it at the same time. We re-create what we have known and we imagine what we are going to do next. Maybe that’s what poets do, too.”

Poetry and baseball are occasions for well-put passion and expressive pondering, and just as passionate attention transforms the prose of everyday life into poetry, it also transforms this game we write about, play, or watch. Editors Brooke Horvath and Tim Wiles unite their own passion for baseball and poetry in this collection, Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems, providing a forum for ninety-two poets. Line after line, like baseball itself game after game and season after season, these poems manage to make the old and the familiar new and surprising.

The poems in these pages invite interrogation, and the reader—like the true baseball fan—must be willing to play the game, for these poems are fun, fresh, angry, nostalgic, meditative, and meant to be read aloud. They are keen on taking us deeply into baseball as sport and intent on offering countless metaphors for exploring history, religion, love, family, and self-identity. Each poem delivers images of pure beauty as the poets speak of murder and ghost runners and old ball gloves, of baseball as a tie that binds families—and indeed the nation—together, of the game as a stage upon which no-nonsense grit and skill are routinely displayed, and of the delight experienced in being one amid a mindlessly happy crowd. This book is true to the game’s long season and to the lives of those the game engages.

Poetry and baseball are occasions for well-put passion and expressive pondering, and just as passionate attention transforms the prose of everyday life into poetry, it also transforms this game we write about, play, or watch. Editors Brooke Horvath and Tim Wiles unite their own passion for baseball and poetry in this collection, Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems, providing a forum for ninety-two poets. Line after line, like baseball itself game after game and season after season, these poems manage to make the old and the familiar new and surprising.
Brooke Horvath is a professor of English at Kent State University and the author of two collections of poetry—In a Neighborhood of Dying Light and Consolation at Ground Zero. He has served as a book review editor for Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature.Tim Wiles is the director of research at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. His baseball writings include a column, “Letters in the Dirt,” in the Cooperstown Freeman’s Journal and poems in Elysian Fields Quarterly and Fan.
Editors Brooke Horvath of Kent State University and Tim Wiles of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum have collected an impressive array of poems that offers readers a chance to reflect on the variety of ways baseball comes up in our lives. The range of the poetry in this volumegives everyone something to consider, as the featured writers explore love, friendship, spirituality, loss, dreams­ – all within the context of the game itself.

For example, Joseph Stanton’s “Stealing Home” describes both that amazing baseball feat and the difficul­ties someone faces when trying to return to a childhood home that now feels like a “strange city,” while Richard Behm’s “Looking for the Baseball” raises questions about changing beliefs as we grow up. “That intellect should doubt itself, / is that the beginning of faith again,” and if so, is it of “the old simple faith”? “No,” Behan answers. “Something/ else then, a greater faith, and less.” He uses the search for a missing baseball as a metaphor for coming to grips with one’s loss of faith, and suggests that, perhaps like the baseball found on the edge of a field, the answer was always there before us.

In “The Cure,” Katherine Harer writes that baseball brings out “our best hope the best we have to give” as “we coach the best out of one anoth­er.” There is innocence in the hope wehave that each batter could be the one to start the rally, and that is why “baseball is a good antidote for death.” It is

pumping belief

into this one afternoon

you can do it

you can do it for us

do it now come on

do it now

David Baker’s “Cardinals in Spring,” like Harer’s poem, gives new life to the idea that baseball can inspire hope in all of us. Looking backto Busch Stadium in 1968, describing the fans in the stadium now as much as then, he asks, “aren’t we, in each other, renewed?”

There are few cliched images in this collection, and any poems that at first appear to cover old terrain soon turn those images into new insights. David C. Ward’s “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” reconsiders the image of a father and son bonding as they play catch. He offers us the idealized imageand then a different reality, one where a “beaten father” beats down his son with “a stinging rebuke” as the two play catch. “‘Come on! / Be a man!”‘ he yells, “stitches thrumming / redly, welting a child’s palm.”

Other poems describe kids learn­ing the game, adults playing for fun, and former major leaguers engaging their skills again, albeit diminished with age. “The Retarded Children Play Baseball” shows us a game where no one really cares that the offi­cial rules are not being followed. “Both teams / are so in love with this moment / when the bat makes the ball jump / or fly” that it does not matter that they will probably never learn the “right” way to play the game.

For fans of the game’s history, there are poems that take us inside specific games or seasons, consider the importance of Mantle or Ruth, talk about the tragedy of Donnie Moore, and relate the importance of Ernie Harwell to an elderly fan. The late Dan Quisenberry’s contribution, “Baseball Cards,” chronicles his career through the pictures fans saw on his cards and reveals what was really happening (nerves, stress, losing time with family, fear of the end of a career) behind those public images.     

Charles Bukowski’s “Betting on the Muse” reminds us that while pro­fessional athletes’ lives may seem per­fect, they often struggle because their successes come when they are so young. He writes:

this is why I chose to be a  writer.

if you’re worth just half-a-damn

you can keep your hustle going

until the last minute of the last day.

you can keep

getting better instead of worse,

you can still keep

hitting them over the wall.

The contributors to Line Drives are proof of Bukowski s message; rarely isan anthology of poetry so consistently strong. The poems put baseball into perspective-examining how it fits into our lives, how it forms a back­drop for important memories, how it offers us chances to consider past friendships. Read this anthology; then share it with friends who love base­ball, who love poetry, or who merely want an opportunity to reflect on life itself.

“Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems deserves a Hall of Fame nomination for the sheer number and variety of poems it anthologizes for the first time. The strongest praise, however, goes to the quality of the collection. These are fine poems by writers at the top of their game, and the editors’ introduction is both wise and heartfelt. A grand slam!”—Don Johnson, editor of Hummers, Knucklers, and Slow Curves: Contemporary Baseball Poems
Editors Brooke Horvath of Kent State University and Tim Wiles of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum have collected an impressive array of poems that offers readers a chance to reflect on the variety of ways baseball comes up in our lives. The range of the poetry in this volume gives everyone something to consider, as the featured writers explore love, friendship, spirituality, loss, dreams­ – all within the context of the game itself.

For example, Joseph Stanton’s “Stealing Home” describes both that amazing baseball feat and the difficul­ties someone faces when trying to return to a childhood home that now feels like a “strange city,” while Richard Behm’s “Looking for the Baseball” raises questions about changing beliefs as we grow up. “That intellect should doubt itself, / is that the beginning of faith again,” and if so, is it of “the old simple faith”? “No,” Behan answers. “Something/ else then, a greater faith, and less.” He uses the search for a missing baseball as a metaphor for coming to grips with one’s loss of faith, and suggests that, perhaps like the baseball found on the edge of a field, the answer was always there before us.

In “The Cure,” Katherine Harer writes that baseball brings out “our best hope the best we have to give” as “we coach the best out of one anoth­er.” There is innocence in the hope we have that each batter could be the one to start the rally, and that is why “baseball is a good antidote for death.” It is

pumping beliefinto this one afternoonyou can do ityou can do it for us do it now come on do it nowDavid Baker’s “Cardinals in Spring,” like Harer’s poem, gives new life to the idea that baseball can inspire hope in all of us. Looking back to Busch Stadium in 1968, describing the fans in the stadium now as much as then, he asks, “aren’t we, in each other, renewed?”

There are few cliched images in this collection, and any poems that at first appear to cover old terrain soon turn those images into new insights. David C. Ward’s “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” reconsiders the image of a father and son bonding as they play catch. He offers us the idealized image and then a different reality, one where a “beaten father” beats down his son with “a stinging rebuke” as the two play catch. “‘Come on! / Be a man!”‘ he yells, “stitches thrumming / redly, welting a child’s palm.”

Other poems describe kids learn­ing the game, adults playing for fun, and former major leaguers engaging their skills again, albeit diminished with age. “The Retarded Children Play Baseball” shows us a game where no one really cares that the offi­cial rules are not being followed. “Both teams / are so in love with this moment / when the bat makes the ball jump / or fly” that it does not matter that they will probably never learn the “right” way to play the game.

For fans of the game’s history, there are poems that take us inside specific games or seasons, consider the importance of Mantle or Ruth, talk about the tragedy of Donnie Moore, and relate the importance of Ernie Harwell to an elderly fan. The late Dan Quisenberry’s contribution, “Baseball Cards,” chronicles his career through the pictures fans saw on his cards and reveals what was really happening (nerves, stress, losing time with family, fear of the end of a career) behind those public images.

Charles Bukowski’s “Betting on the Muse” reminds us that while pro­fessional athletes’ lives may seem per­fect, they often struggle because their successes come when they are so young. He writes:

this is why I chose to be a writer.if you’re worth just half-a-damnyou can keep your hustle goinguntil the last minute of the last day.you can keepgetting better instead of worse,you can still keephitting them over the wall.The contributors to Line Drives are proof of Bukowski s message; rarely is an anthology of poetry so consistently strong. The poems put baseball into perspective-examining how it fits into our lives, how it forms a back­drop for important memories, how it offers us chances to consider past friendships. Read this anthology; then share it with friends who love base­ball, who love poetry, or who merely want an opportunity to reflect on life itself.

Additional information

Dimensions 1 × 6 × 9 in