Glory and Gloom Peter Makuck (bio) Headhunting and Other Sports Poems by Philip Raisor (Turning Point Books, 2014. 86pages. $18 pb) Philip Raisor’s solid new volume is all about sports and games: baseball, football, basketball, horseshoes, hockey, surf-fishing, boxing, cycling, soccer, golf, and even checkers. Sometimes sport is in the foreground, sometimes in the depth of field. The first poem, “Principles,” connects families and teams: “We heard / from our fathers the names of Ruth, Musial, / Williams, Feller, and shared a reverence / for heroes.” Fathers shoot baskets and play catch with their sons, and on game day parents, uncles, and aunts are in the stands cheering. One of the first principles is to play fairly and not deliberately hurt your opponent, but Raisor’s book has two competing epigraphs about opponents. One quotes Demosthenes as saying “do not return until you have devoured his wattles”; another quotes major-league baseball’s Mark Reynolds: “If you’re going to hit somebody, just stay below the waist. Don’t headhunt. . . . It’s bush league.” War, of course, is another kind of game, and it makes some powerful appearances in this volume. The speaker of “The Iliad Games” remembers Greek wrestling with Raisor’s teenage friend Chili and others. They imagined “thousands surrounding us in this / empty hall” and “we called on the gods to watch.” The memory of “Laughter, heroes, honor in the old sense / lasted until Chili was blown up near Saigon. / / He wore no ribbons. We held no games.” One of the impressive achievements of these poems—mostly narratives of one to four pages—is the way Raisor imagines his way into other lives, using first-, second-, and third-person viewpoints. Having played basketball with Wilt Chamberlain at the University of Kansas, Raisor knows this sport intimately, but in an arresting poem like “Rising Star” he convincingly moves to soccer and tells the story of a young girl practicing, following her dream by kicking a ball against a garage door “again and again, / explosions even neighbors approved.” Her father is a brute who abuses her mother and probably the girl as well. Come game time, however, we watch her gracefully swerve through a “maze of defenders” who try to block her header, but she scores “leaping and wagging in celebration.” As we know, sport can be distraction as well as salvation from a hostile environment. “Disabled in Baqouba, Iraq,” another moving war poem, tells of a woman who was a track star in college, had athletic dreams, but went into the service and lost her legs in a firefight. While I followed her courageous struggle, Knute Rockne’s old saw came to mind: “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” Sports have a way of teaching you not to give up. In the volume’s title poem, a local batter gets beaned and goes down, but not for the count. On his way to first base, he flips off the pitcher and “with over a hundred witnesses stomping / in the stands we raised our fingers to glory.” Whether it is an unknown local talent or a Roger Bannister, [End Page i] Don Larsen, or Muhammad Ali, sports provide us with beauty, grace, glory, and memorable moments that keep the wolves of oblivion at bay. Winning and losing are both unforgettable. In “A Photo-Finish Archive” Raisor describes loss as “a Malaysian caning,” your stomach feeling like “industrial waste.” Victory, however, means that “All at once you can speak five languages” and “All at once Mary Magdalene is at your feet.” Headhunting includes humorous poems, some seeing sport from the fan’s viewpoint as well as the player’s. “Where Men are Men” is about the kind of fan who goes bonkers when his team is losing and angrily clicks off his tv to “break down boxes for recycling.” He hopes his Redskins will be in the red zone when he returns. Glued again to the tv, he gets annoyed at his wife, who asks him to hold the stepladder while “she replaces the bulb still on his list.” He hates talking heads, statistics, and fans who wear war paint, but on a Sunday afternoon, you can find...