Today, for some reason, I am thinking about sports, specifically about sports as metaphor. Maybe it is because it is spring, when the very long hockey season begins to wane and the shorter baseball season starts up? The impetus was my own poem, and then I started to think about a poem I read long ago that still impresses me no end.: David Bottoms’ early poem, “For My Father, Who Stressed the Bunt.” I am especially taken by the end of the poem, actually. It begins,

On the rough diamond,
the hand-cut field below the dog-lot and barn,
we rehearsed the strict technique
of bunting.

Bottoms is an American original with his own voice and point of view. I first encountered his work in the mid-1980s when he visited the M.F.A. program I was in. His second book, In a U-Haul North of Damascus (Quill, New York, 1983) was newly published. He was a mesmerizing reader, and I am still reading the poems in that slender volume with undiminished pleasure–cherishing the inscription, too.

A native Georgian, Bottoms now lives in Atlanta where he holds the John B. and Elena Diaz-Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University and coedits Five Points: A Journal of Art and Literature. The whole text of this amazing poem, as well as others by Bottoms, and a full bio, are available at the Poetry Foundation website and can be accessed through the links above.

P.S. In case you might wonder, there is a small city in Georgia called “Damascus.” Current population? 254 at last count!

Background for My Poem for April 8: “Hockey and Me”:

This morning, I awoke with the idea for this poem about the sport of hockey in my head. It practically wrote itself.

Happy Reading! Happy Writing! LESLIE