Customer Reviews

Baseball Haiku: The Best Haiku Ever Written about the Game

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For a book of haiku --about baseball no less-- to break out into wider readership the way this book has is reminiscent of Dave Brubeck and Stan Getz bringing jazz into the popular music charts in the 1960's. My sister gave me this book for my birthday and, as Thomas Merton wrote, as long as it talks, I'm going to listen.

Cor van den Heuvel and Nanae Tamura have assembled a tour de force of baseball haiku. America brought baseball to Japan and Japan gifted this country with haiku. There is a most enjoyable introduction about the history of baseball haiku in both countries. The book has a long section of haiku by well-known, and less well-known, haiku poets in the United States, followed by a rich collection of translated Japanese haiku featuring the game. Van den Heuvel concludes with an appreciative essay on baseball in the United States and Japan.

Here are some samples which reflect moments which come in the world of baseball:

walking home
with his glove on his head
shrieking cicadas
Imai Sei

summer afternoon
the long fly ball to center field
takes its time
Cor van den Heuvel

dog days of summer
twenty-three games
out of first
Michael Ketchek

This last poem sounds the tone of melancholy, called wabi in the classic Japanese haiku tradition, which many of the haiku in this book capture beautifully and hauntingly, and which is certainly is eventually present for any young or aging participant (or observer) in the game. Here are a few more evocations:

while playing ball
it becomes time to go home
to supper
Kawahigashi Hekigoto

calm evening
the ballgame play-by-play
across the water
Jim Kacian

Baseball haiku, because of their brevity, will not provide the same kind of reading as Jimmy Breslin's writing about the 1962 Mets in his chapter "They're Afraid to Come Out," nor Ed Linn's reporting on Ted Williams' last game in 1960.

But they make their own special offering. Speaking of melancholy, in my case I grew up in the 1950's in Kansas City, which gives a certain meaning to the term Kansas City Blues. By the way, Cor van den Heuvel loves jazz too. Get the book.

The flyleaf of Baseball Haiku begins "there are moments in every baseball game that make fans catch their breath...Haiku captures these moments like no other poetic form..." and there you have it.
If I had to choose the quintessential kigo (season word) for "summer", it would have to be "baseball". Although played in spring and autumn, nothing for me says "summer" like a baseball game (and at the beach, listening to a game on the radio).
Jim Kacian slyly elevates the game to a religion:

October revival
all hands lift
to the foul ball

while Brenda Gannon has some wonderful plays (!) on sex:

handsome pitcher
my eyes drift down
to the mound

Many of Van Den Heuvel's own haiku deal with the anticipation of the game:

baseball cards
spread out on the bed
April rain

a spring breeze
flutters the notice
for baseball tryouts

as well as my favourite:

lingering snow
the game of catch continues
into evening

The Japanese haiku have a definite and different expression but the feel and impressions are similar.
My only wish is that there could be more!

Baseball haiku is indeed a genre of which I was unaware. This is a wonderful book for fans of the lore of baseball, history, and the art of Haiku.