Touching All the Bases

Book excerpt: The catcher cradles a quick leather signal squatting on new spikes waiting for the curve to drop like a head into his basket. From odes to Josh Gibson and Curt Flood to poems about Denny McLain and the anonymous dancing usher at a minor league game, poet Tim Peeler celebrates the overlooked and the standout as he merges the topics of personal and baseball-related rediscovery. A bat is a lost artifact in Adirondack, while Writing Baseball Poems in Winter and Baseball Archaeologists deal explicitly with recovery. Several other poems underscore the continued significance of baseball memories, as the poet reconsiders events and people from his adolescence, offering the reader a candid look at his family, coaches and friends, as well as the players he watched, read about or merely imagined.