Reviewed by Gregory Placonouris
The Rain 4:2 (Summer-Autumn 2006): 4
George Bowering’s Baseball Love is as much about social processes as it is about baseball. In addition to cataloguing a whole bunch of strikes, outs, runs and homers, Bowering tackles such difficult topics as aging, new love, as well as the social and political tensions that divide Vancouver. For example, after giving us a number of anecdotes about baseball diamonds on the west side of Vancouver, Bowering heads to the east side and tells us: “It wasn’t the sixties anymore. We didn’t say Cricket Chatter Park and Daisy Beanblossom Stadium. Needle Park is not funny, but we said it as if it were, sometimes. Most of our games were on Sundays, which are big around Woodland Park. When we arrived at our home field we would have to groom the playing area, meaning that we would search the outfield grass for hypodermic needles and carefully dispose of them, near but not inside the garbage barrel, in case anyone should rummage through it with bare hands. [...] Playing ball in Vancouver in the late twentieth century” (174).
So in addition to the game of baseball, we also learn about some of the social conditions of Vancouver life. We also learn about Vancouver weather, and the disparity with which Vancouverites deal with the weather. Bowering remarks, “It rains in Vancouver, and after it stops raining, it is still wet. In the nice high school diamonds on the west side there is drainage. A day after a week’s rain, these grassy diamonds are ready to go. On the east side, however, where none of Vancouver’s alderpersons lives, there are wide puddles at home plate...” (174-175). Throughout the volume there are implicit and explicit critiques of American and Canadian political and social life, as well as pitches for literature, free speech and the freedom to travel.
In Baseball Love, in addition to learning a lot about baseball (and a few things about politics) one also learns a lot about Bowering. Since, in my view, George Bowering is one of Canada’s most important twentieth (and twenty-first) century writers, this knowledge is important. We learn that Bowering has been hospitalized with baseball injuries, that he likes bars in the United States and “no nonsense hamburgers” (77) and he sometimes gets migraine headaches. In addition, we learn quite a lot about Bowering’s writing process. Good postmodernist that he is, Bowering lets us on in on the fascinating process of living, writing and revising Baseball Love. For example: “I had one of my headaches (as I do now at this instant of writing [though not as this instance of re-writing], but I do have one now that I am re-rewriting] on the last day of the year) all day, and by late evening I would also be shaky” (202). Bowering’s authorial interventions and insertions in parentheses and square brackets make his prose a kind of poetry. A very personal but very precise poetry. Like the game of baseball itself.