The Warsaw Sparks/Singular Lives (Iowa Series in North American Autobiography) - Softcover

Gary Gildner is an award-winning poet and novelist whose works include My Grandfather's Book, Blue Like the Heavens, and The Bunker in the Parsley Fields, which won the Iowa Poetry Prize. He has also received the National Magazine Award for Fiction, Pushcart Prizes in fiction and nonfiction, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams and Theodore Roethke poetry prizes, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.  Albert E. Stone is the author of several books, including Literary Aftershocks: American Writers, Readers, and the Bomb.

This idiosyncratic memoir of an American poet and fiction writer's experience coaching a baseball team in Warsaw is a potpourri of politics, social commentary, the author's family history, humor, poems and, of course, baseball. Gildner examines the sport in order to address other concerns: the poem "A Mouse," about a player getting hit with a pitch during practice and the apologetic, affectionate kisses of the pitcher, ends as the narrator tries "to picture / something like this in the States. / Maybe at a nursery school you'd see it, / where people have good manners, love, / and other things to teach." All the poems resonate, detailing characters and situations introduced elsewhere. The prose, too, features such moments as a player holding his mitt out to field the moon, waiting to make "a catch unlike any other, involving earth and heaven." But when Gildner ( The Second Bridge ) moves away from baseball to describe his childhood or a Solidarity demonstration, the book lags; these diverse topics never fully cohere. Photos not seen by PW.
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