keeping score
Reviewed by Ron Smith, St. Christopher's School
JUNE 11, 2007 archive
More Than Festering Manhood
My friend Bob Hamblin has published a hymn to the pleasures of sport. That some of the book's pleasures are masochistic is part of its charm.
Keeping Score: Sports Poems for Every Season presents forty-nine poems that, on the whole, glorify American games and exalt sport heroes. From baseball (nineteen poems) and football (six) through track and field, tennis, wrestling, fishing, horse racing (nine) to basketball (fourteen), from Hank Aaron, Ron Swoboda, and Martina Navratilova to local and regional idols, the poems remember and examine, commemorate and extol. Occasional censure serves only to increase reverence.
The short football section has the highest percentage of successes, though the sexual metaphors there (and elsewhere) work only when they push us toward true mysteries. “Letter from an Old Teammate,” ostensibly about the “festering manhood” of a quarterback and his center, evokes mysteries of love and identity.
On the whole, the verses in Keeping Score move along pretty conventional surfaces. Its prologue-poem, “The Dumb Jock Replies,” welcomes into the collection wholesome sports fans who've never picked up a volume of poetry or philosophy, while directly addressing the stereotypical intelligentsia. ”You make too much of mind,” the reader is told. “Jocks know not to think / in the middle of the backswing.” And, in truth, one can imagine using Hamblin's “Basketball Suite” as a crisp introduction to the game in its title.
Make no mistake: Hamblin has plenty of credentials in the Fields of Profundity. He's a Faulkner scholar, with a dozen important critical volumes to his credit. However, his aim in almost all of these poems is not profundity, but agreeableness, and the poems are especially agreeable when they bow with mature humility in a cloud of nostalgic, sometimes boyish delight.
The book has a number of memorable moments, but Keeping Scores's most completely successful poems are, I think, “Requital” and “Basketball at 65.”
In “Requital” a son accompanies his elderly father fishing and concludes the narrative by granting that father and himself a healing vision of vigor and beauty. From being “grateful / for the armistice of age, / the peace that somehow survives / the rage of passion and regret,” the speaker leaps suddenly to “Like that bass there, / which you now lead thrashing / across the violent wave / and lift, with still strong / and steady hands, into / the splendid, sun-splashed air.”
The lean dialogue of “Basketball at 65” enacts a miniature comic drama of resistance giving way to resignation. Or a revelation of resignation. Or is that anticipation of grace? Anyhow, here's the entire poem:
Basketball at 65We also play who only stand and wait.
“Are you still
playing basketball?”
my sister asked,
during a recent visit.
“Yes,” I told her,
“when my knees will allow.”
“You don't play full court, do you?”
“No. Just half-court.”
Then, on second thought:
“Actually we don't play
half-court either;
we usually just stand
in one place
and hope the ball
will come to us.”
Robert Hamblin. Keeping Score: Sports Poems for Every Season by St. Louis: Time Being Books, 2007. $15.95.
Copyright © 2007 by Ron Smith.