Dingers

Baseball and literature, both 'high' and 'low' have long sat side-by-side in the dugout. The Great Writer, Papa Hemingway watches the game and yearns to hit one more novelistic homerun, while the inarticulate player characterises a sharp piece of fielding as 'pure poetry'. In "Dingers", essayists, fiction writers, and poets describe baseball's combinations and forms, seeking to plumb its meaning as a game and maybe metaphor for Life's deeper truths. Teamed together to play literary ball are writers such as George Bowering, Robert Allen, Timothy Morris, Arjun Basu, Jason Camlot, Dave Bidini, etc., the epic game is dramatised in all its variety, from the major and minor leagues, down to Little Leagues, and pickup games in sandlots. Some cerebral wag high up in the bleachers once reflected baseball is more about losing than winning a good batter only hits thirty per cent of the time and only one team wins The World Series. In this it bears a resemblance to fine writing, which may explain its extraordinary appeal to the ink-stained class. Happily for the reader, the songs and stories of some of the most verbally eloquent and talented of baseball wannabe s can be found between these covers.