Take Me Out to the Ballgame

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta. He is
the author of Calling Texas, Earth Prime, and Mind the Gap.

Canada has two poets who are mad about baseball: George Bowering and
Raymond Souster. Souster, now in his 80s and a presence in Canadian
poetry since the mid-1940s, has always written an accessible,
image-centred kind of poetry in colloquial language. Take Me Out to the
Ballgame contains tributes to the Toronto Blue Jays as well as poems
about earlier teams and Souster’s own experiences playing the game. He
proves capable of some surprising sexism in “Girls Playing
Softball,” and too often he trades in mere anecdotes, but his poems
have a charming warmth of tone (and not a little nostalgia mixed in).
This well-produced volume is a fan’s book and will appeal to other
fans, though it contains more bunts than home runs.