Motion: American Sports Poems

. University of Iowa Press, $39.95 (256pp) ISBN 978-0-87745-754-1

From Randall Jarrell's matter-of-fact elegy ""Say Goodbye to Big Daddy"" (""who found football easy enough"") to Catherine Bowman's ""My Knicks Are Going to Beat Your Spurs NBA Souvenir Bracelet 1999 For My Long Distance Love,"" Motion: American Sports Poems collects recent and semi-recent versifications of our national pastimes. Editor and poet Noah Blaustein (who includes his ""Water & Light"": ""It was too soon/ To think of her passing,/ So I passed/ Evenings in the water"") gathers a mostly masculine cheering section of 100 poets James Tate, James Wright, James Haug, James McKean and James Galvin among them. ( Apr.)

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