<div dir="ltr"><div>All<br></div><div>Don Johnson's review of Dale Ritterbucsh's collection of sports poems is attached and below.</div><div>Thanks</div><div>Duncan</div><div><br></div><div>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">Review of Dale Ritterbusch’s <i>The Stinger, Eclectic Blue Publishing, 2022</i><span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span> </span>When I
first looked at my review copy of Dale Ritterbusch’s new volume of poems, I
assumed the title referred to a football injury, that numbed-shoulder shock
that occasionally results from a particularly hard hit and temporarily makes
continued play difficult.<span> </span>My assumption,
however, was incorrect.<span> </span>The title poem
is about baseball, a “fathers playing catch with sons” story that undermines
the popular notion of that experience creating a life-long bond between father
and son.<span> </span>In “The Stinger,” the father is
a stepfather who regularly berates the son for being a “Momma’s boy” and who
uses play not only to embarrass the boy but sometimes to inflict both physical
and psychological damage by delivering to him a pitch too hot for him to handle
with ease, a “stinger” which “burns [his} hand with each catch.”<span> </span>One might expect the evidence of the father’s
cruelty to be a physical manifestation in the aftermath of that burning, but
Ritterbusch instead suggests the enduring psychic quality of the injury with
the observation that “the sky” under which the game played out “reddened like a
welt,” which would serve as a life-long reminder of childhood indignities.<span> </span>The poem begins the volume and also initiates
the poet’s pattern of persistent challenges to our perceived notions of the
myriad ways sport affects our lives and relationships.<span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span> </span>There are
at least two football poems in this collection, and the attention the poet pays
to multiple sports is one of the features that sets it apart.<span> </span>Ordinarily one finds entire volumes dedicated
to one sport.<span> </span>I think of Tim Peeler’s <i>Touching All the Bases</i> or Jack Ridl’s <i>Losing Season</i>.<span> </span>Other collections include sports poems that
support overriding themes inserted in volumes whose subjects range from
childhood to the function of art.<span> </span>Ron
Smith’s <i>The Humility</i> <i>of the Brutes</i> comes to mind in this
regard.<span> </span>Only Robert Hamblin’s <i>Keeping Score: Sports Poems for Every Season
</i>comes to my mind as a volume solely dedicated to sport and offering a wide
and varied range of activities.<span> </span>But <i>The Stinger </i><span>at 128 pp. </span>is a bit longer, and, if anything, more varied in its
range of sport and play:<span> </span>baseball,
basketball, fishing, running, tennis, sledding, and wrestling. <span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span> </span>More
significantly, it’s the poet’s take on the recurrent tropes in all of sport
literature that distinguishes these poems, whose cumulative effect is persuasive
and powerful.<span> </span>Among these are
Ritterbusch’s rejection of the father/son cliché mentioned above in poems about
his daughter’s participation in athletics and outdoor sports.<span> </span>Best among these is “Sixth Grade Hoops” in
which the father, who has guided the young girl throughout her short “career,”
has “learned / not to say anything about the game” just completed for fear of
the daughter’s reaction to his coaching.<span>
</span>In this instance, however, he is surprised by the girl’s suggestion that
they “shoot some hoops” together when they arrive home.<span> </span>“There is plenty of time before dark,” she
says.<span> </span>He smiles, agreeing that “there’s
plenty of time” even for him to learn “<i>this</i>
game” of sharing a relationship with his daughter.<span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span> </span>Two other
“givens” that the poet systematically questions are the popular notion that
sport teaches athletes about the game of life, and that it offers a vehicle for
a kind of transcendence.<span> </span>Epistemology
is a central issue in this book.<span> </span>It’s
remarkable to me how often variations of the words “learn,” “teach,” “know,”
“lesson[s]” appear, followed up more often than not with the caveat that
lessons, even knowledge, evaporate once the athletic moment is past.<span> </span>In the boxing poem, “Soft Hands,” for
example, the speaker describes his regimen of soaking his battered hands in
salt water as, “penance / for the acquisition of knowledge,” but ultimately
“what he knows is” is limited to muscular awareness with perfect
equilibrium.”<span> </span>Later in that same poem,
after hitting the heavy bag, he admits that the “only lesson” learned in this
experience resides not in his brain, but in his “skull.” It becomes a physical
rather than an intellectual resource. <span> </span>In “Cecropia,” the description of a captured
moth pinned to his bedroom wall morphs into a memory of his coach kicking him
off his high school wrestling team.<span> </span>He
chalks this experience up as “another lesson” he “had to learn,” but admits in
the next stanza that “explanations” [for his shortcomings] “seldom work; /
reason its own impasse, logic an impediment, experience the same.”<span> </span>In “The Outfield Coming Home,” a veteran has
difficulty reassuming his place in the outfield and ultimately twists his ankle
in a gopher hole while going back on a “routine fly ball.”<span> </span>After subsequent errors he is forced to
admit to himself that<span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0in 0.5in;text-indent:0.5in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span> </span>whatever he had learned <span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0in 0.5in;text-indent:0.5in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span> </span>over all those years, <span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0in 0.5in;text-indent:0.5in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span> </span>so sure and straight <span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0in 0.5in;text-indent:0.5in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">was uneven, like
the ground he played on,<span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0in 0.5in;text-indent:0.5in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">the air shimmering
above the diamond,<span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0in 0.5in;text-indent:0.5in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">the light playing
tricks,<span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0in 0.5in;text-indent:0.5in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">and that one sure
thing lost in the sun.<span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span> </span>In other
poems what we learn is mostly internalized in an amalgam of visceral
appropriation and memory that translates to a kind of transcendence, the
product of heightened awareness often accompanying that isolated experience
when the participant is “in the moment.” Ritterbusch describes this experience
as <span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span> </span>that
moment when the intellect<span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span> </span>the
body, work with such perfect synchronicity<span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span> </span>that
reverence, prayer, the eternal faith of <span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span> </span>the
hopeful athlete, the committed fan, is drawn<span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span> </span>contemplatively
to the pleasure<span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span> </span>of
a perfect toss . . .<span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span> </span>“Beyond
the Haggis Toss”<span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">In “Aubade,” after making love, the poet compares the
perfection of the experience to childhood pleasures, “those years of play” that
have not been lost,” that “still course through the blood” and “have not been
lost.”<span> </span>In “Sledding with Kerry,” the
speaker experiences a return to childhood when he and his daughter go too fast
and become “airborne into a sea of snow,” the beauty, exhilaration and
heightened physical awareness scouring the years off his body, making him a
child again.<span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span> </span>It’s
instructive that these moments emerge in these poems not through heroic
endeavor, but mostly as a result of rather ordinary endeavor, common
circumstances made extraordinary through the participants’ heightened
awareness.<span> </span>But these, too, are only
tentatively accepted owing to their mysterious nature. The two poems in the
collection recounting the poet’s “bonding” with coyotes while he is out running
offer perfect illustrations.<span> </span>In “Running
with a Coyote,” the poet is joined in his nightly run by a coyote who keeps
pace with him through a suburban neighborhood in Colorado.<span> </span>In the poet’s mind, the two are linked
spiritually until the animal veers off and leaves the runner alone, but not
without his wishing the coyote a night of good hunting and “a howl that will
wake the neighborhood.”<span> </span>“Coyote Sangha”
describes another night run in the suburbs where the speaker, already at one
with his environment, watches a coyote’s dark shadow fade into the brush and
imagines the totemic animal, already representing in the poet’s mind “the
process of withdraw and return, / the eternal grace of resurrection,” urges him
to follow, conveying the message that “the temple lies ahead, / just below the
blossoming moon.”<span> </span>These coyote “visions”
illustrate as well as anything in <i>The</i>
<i>Stinger </i>the poet’s faith in the
epigraph from Wallace Stevens he selected to introduce the volume: “The
greatest poverty is not to live in a physical world.”<span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span> </span>One more
point.<span> </span>My most positive reaction to
these poems is the degree to which they evoke memories of other sports
poems.<span> </span>“Playing Center in my Forties”
brings to my mind David Bottoms’ “Sign for my Father, Who Stressed the
Bunt.”<span> </span>“Old Guys Playing Hoops” makes me
want to re-read David Hilton’s “The Poet Tries to Turn in His Jock,” and “She
Throws Like a Girl” invites comparisons with Nancy Boutilier’s “To Throw Like a
Boy.”<span> </span>There are others. I would be the
first to insist, however, that these parallels are communal rather than
derivative.<span> </span>They signify Dale
Ritterbusch’s kinship with the community of writers and scholars envisioned by
the founders of the Sport Literature Association lo these many years ago. <i>The Stinger</i> offers its<span> </span>reader not discrete bits of knowledge or
specific applications of experience of the kind often proclaimed on locker room
posters.<span> </span>On the contrary, one might
argue that the reward the thoughtful individual might reap from sporting endeavors
shapes and nurtures the soul. <span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">Don Johnson<span> </span><span></span></p>
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</div><div><div><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">Remember to smell the roses as you recumber past<br><br>Duncan R. Jamieson, Ph. D.<br>Professor of History<br>Book Review Editor<br><i>AETHLON: The Journal of Sport Literature</i><br>Ashland University<br>Ashland, OH 44805<br>USA<br></div></div></div></div>