Fathers Playing Catch with Sons

In the pantheon of great sports literature, not a few poets have tried their hand at paying tribute to their love of the game—Walt Whitman, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams among them. This elegant volume collects Donald Hall’s prose about sports, concentrating on baseball but extending to basketball, football and Ping-Pong. The essays are a wonderful mixture of reminiscence and observation, of baseball and of fathers and sons, of how a game binds people together and bridges generations.

Praise

"There will always be golden boys playing in games that have diamonds in them, and those boys will always get old, and life will change, but there's something gently beautiful in that process. Baseball is one metaphor for the changing of seasons, and Hall—as poet and seer here—raises Sport to Art."—Los Angeles Times

"Hall surprises even the well-read fans . . . His vignettes are vivid and haunting."—San Francisco Chronicle

"Nobody who likes [to] 'enter the intense, artificial, pastoral universe of the game' will fail to be charmed by Hall’s musings."—Newsweek

About the Author(s)

Donald Hall

Best known as a poet, Donald Hall lives on his New Hampshire farm. In addition to his many books of poetry, he has published short stories, collections of essays, and children's books.