The Warsaw Sparks: A Memoir - Softcover

Gildner, Gary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0803217560 ISBN 13: 9780803217560

Publisher: Bison Books, 2008

Synopsis

In 1987 noted poet and author Gary Gildner went to Poland on a Fulbright scholarship to teach at the University of Warsaw. One January day, a Warsaw sportswriter came knocking on Gildner’s classroom door with a problem and a request. The professional baseball team he had organized the year before could not win; would the professor—who he had heard was a baseball player—come help?
Told with gripping lyric simplicity, The Warsaw Sparks is about an American’s experience coaching a baseball team in Poland and about hope and memory and the education of a poet. Prepare to meet an unlikely cast of characters, including Stan Musial, Lech Walesa, Dariusz the Organizer, and such Sparks as Froggy, Pizza Hut, the Cubans, and little Jerzy Bin the catcher: “Call me George, Coach. Like George Herman Babe Ruth.”

About this title

About the Author

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.

From Publishers Weekly

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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About this edition

• Publisher: Bison Books
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0803217560
• ISBN 13: 9780803217560
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 264