OPENING DAYS: Sports Poems
By
The team behind Extra Innings (1993), a book of baseball poems, widens their coverage of sports with this collection of 18 pieces of verse as nimble as their subjects. Particularly pleasing: Gary Soto's intimate, clever vignette on weight lifting; Walt Whitman's words on a runner's stride; Ray Wesson's miniature ode to exhaustion (""My feet/And seat/Are beat""), and Milton Bracket's witty exultation of baseball's opening day. Not every piece is gold--Jane Yolen makes mush of karate--but the book is never compromised. The imagery in Medlock's bright, heroic paintings ably captures the mood and energy of the poems.