Description:
The essays in Fathers Playing Catch with Sons 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.
In the pantheon of great sports literature, not a few poets have tried their hand at paying tribute to their love affair with 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.
Brief description: Best known as a poet, Donald Hall lived by freelance writing on his New Hampshire farm. In addition to his many books of poetry, he published short stories, collections of essays, and children's books, including the Ox-Cart Man.
Review Quotes:
"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
"Nobody who like to . . . 'enter the intense, artificial, pastoral universe of the game' will fail to be charmed by Hall's musings." --Newsweek