Thru the Smoky End Boards: Canadian Poetry About Sports and Games

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

The Brooks brothers have assembled a splendid book—big-league volume,
in fact. It is astonishing how many Canadian poems there are about
sports. Hockey and baseball, the predictable favorites, get their own
sections, but the editors also give plenty of attention to solitary
sports like swimming, skating, running, and skiing. We would expect to
find poems about golf and tennis, but there are also some about
volleyball, lacrosse, and bocce (a game of bowls played on a narrow
outdoor court). The poems are generally excellent. The editors have even
found a hockey lyric by The Tragically Hip.

Most of the 20th-century poets, from Milton Acorn to Tom Wayman, are
represented, and an index of poets has been included. Biographical notes
would have been useful (a few of the writers are not generally known).
If, as Wordsworth and Coleridge maintained, a poem is meant to give
pleasure, this book measures up very well.