Catching the Light

Description

‘Cricket is battle and service and sport and art’ says Douglas Jardine as he dreams up brutal tactics to beat the Australians in the 1930s. It’s also about class and race, language and reflection, it’s timeless and it’s ‘just a game’. It’s Empire and sunset, death and renewal, children and long-ago memories. Sometimes, it’s just dust and sunburn.

‘What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?’ CLR James’ famous question can be heard within the poems of this anthology – the game is a vehicle for opening up an understanding of the world and our place in it, among ourselves, among nature, among history, in time.

The fractured dreams of wide-eyed children feature alongside the exploded rhythms of a day spent not watching but feeling the game, measured and deliberate and not always under control. The emotional range of cricket’s living theatre is fully explored as ordinary actions are transformed into myth and back again. The rhythms of play are insisted upon and exploded.

Major poets like Ted Hughes, Simon Armitage and Sean O’Brien have all written poems that use cricket as metaphor for – for different things. Suspended moments, revenge, class – cricket as a vehicle. Sebastian Faulks has provided his first ever published poem, a haiku, full of longing. John Agard, the most Caribbean of poets, has several in this anthology – Give the ball to the Poet closes the collection. Poems from India, including work by Arundhathi Subramaniam, emerge through the lens of the status of the English language in that literary culture. We’ve moved on from nostalgia to a poetic world that is vibrant with inventive language, politically engaged and aware of the flaws and triumphs of our fellows. Brand new poems from Tim Key and Ian McMillan also feature.