Motion: American Sports Poems

Rating:
Summary: Well-chosen poems
Review: This anthology is an excellent selection of sports poems, somewhere around 140 or so. The table of contents is alphabetic by poet's name and there is an index arranged by sport. There are poems about the big sports, baseball, football, boxing. Also poems on running, surfing, race car driving, hunting, fishing. One poem each on rodeo, skiing, wrestling, scuba diving. Even a poem on bowling.

There's a long (more than 3 page) poem by B.H. Fairchild about baseball called "Body and Soul" which I loved and I'm not much of a baseball fan. It's a rich and complex narrative, tells a story I can sit and read over and over again. There's a football poem by Adrian Louis, "At the House of Ghosts" that's about a man looking back on his football days 20 years past. I liked this one even though I've never watched a football game in my life.

There's much to like here even with the sports you may not be a fan of or be familiar with, because the editor has chosen the poems well. They range from poems that get into the specifics of an activity like weight lifting or running, to poems that take a step back and look at the place of a sport in our culture or just tell a good story.