In baseball, as in much poetry, beauty comes from tension. Groundrules and boundaries confine those who would play, but the best find ways to exploit their strictures, and just as the daring base runner takes second on a fly to right, the practiced poet trips the sleepy reader with a surprise rhyme, bold line break, or a jarring reversal of foot. It’s no surprise, then, that hardball has a larger body of literature than other sports, or that aficionados are more likely than others to quote lines of verse in support of the game they love.
This is Tim Peeler’s second book of poems from baseball. It contains some of his most moving and best-crafted poetry. Starting with time-honored themes—fathers and sons, baseball and time, memory and the nation, team and player and loyalty—the poet adapts the universal to the local and personal, proving that baseball, with its easy accommodation of reflection, remains a powerful tool for mining our individual and collective history.

Tim Peeler is a lecturer in English, journal editor, essayist and poet. He is a winner of the Jim Harrison Award for his contributions to baseball poetry and lives in Hickory, North Carolina.

Tim Peeler
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 128
Bibliographic Info: index
Copyright Date: 2001
pISBN: 978-0-7864-1127-6
eISBN: 978-0-7864-6256-8
Imprint: McFarland

Preface     1

The Poems    

Index of Titles and First Lines     121

Honorable Mention, Casey Award—Spitball
“poems that make good, solid contact with the reader…more than a hundred poems…one marvels at (and is perhaps a little jealous of) his prolificity…a prism through which we reflect upon failure or celebrate heroes or delight in the intrusion of the absurdly marvelous into the clueless mundane”—Elysian Fields Quarterly; “a wonderful compendium…outstanding poetry”—Midwest Book Review; “enjoyable reading…highly recommend…entertaining reading…fun…a must read”—Asheville Poetry Review; “Peeler has loaded the bases with multi-layered vignettes…a home run in any league”—Main Street Rag; “You don’t have to appreciate baseball, or even know anything about it, to be profoundly moved by Tim Peeler’s writing. Waiting for Godot’s First Pitch is far more than a book of poems. It is a graceful and perceptive examination of our lives and our reasons for living.”—Robert Inman, author of Dairy Queen Days; “A fine volume [that]…transcends baseball.”—Ron Rash, author of Raising the Dead.