How I Found Love Behind the Catcher's Mask

Book excerpt: One can watch many baseball games before seeing a triple play. With this book E. Ethelbert Miller completes his baseball trilogy. How I Found Love Behind the Catcher’s Mask is a collection of poems that celebrates baseball by putting a spin on how the game brings meaning to one’s life. Well known Washington, D.C. poet, former Howard University professor, and literary activist, Ethelbert Miller is personal and political when writing from the batter’s box or pitching mound. Here are poems that tip their caps to Joe DiMaggio, Ken Griffey Sr., and Emmett Ashford. Miller's book does not duck from examining the Black Sox Scandal, the career of Glenn Burke or the tragedy of Carl Mays. Miller’s own life at times is a playing field for sadness and what Ellington called “mood indigo.” But his love for baseball is a complete game and continues to reflect the hard heat of pleasure. After If God Invented Baseball and When Your Wife Has Tommy John Surgery and other Baseball Stories, this book, like a triple play, is a thing of beauty. “Baseball should create a new position, poet laureate, and give it to E. Ethelbert Miller. In his third collection of baseball poems (‘a double turning into a trilogy,’ as he writes), Miller weaves knuckleballs and pickoff throws with universal themes of family, race, relationships—and the issues of our time, like rioting and voting rights. With allusions to Monbouquette and Giacometti, Henderson and Danticat, How I Found Love Behind the Catcher’s Mask will make you laugh, think and feel a whole new way about baseball and the world around it.”—Tyler Kepner, national baseball columnist for the New York Times and author of the best-selling K: A History of Baseball In Ten Pitches "Ethelbert Miller is one of the most significant and influential poets of our time." --Gwendolyn Brooks