Poetry. In KEEPING SCORE, Hamblin celebrates sport as both a participant and a spectator. The heat of competition, the camaraderie of the team, and the memories of games and athletes past, in both victory and defeat, are captured here. Keeping Score is, indeed, an offering of "God's plenty," poems ranging, in subject, from childhood baseball to pole vaulting. It is, without question, the most comprehensive collection of sports poems, by one author, on the market. And for anyone who cares about sport and poetry, Hamblin's words, like those of the early radio sportscasters he admired, are proclamations "from angelic messengers."--Don Johnson.

Author City: Cape Girardeau, MO USA

Robert Hamblin was born in Jericho, Mississippi, in 1938. He holds undergraduate degrees from Northeast Mississippi Community College and Delta State University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Mississippi. A professor of English, as well as director of the Center for Faulkner Studies, at Southeast Missouri State University, in Cape Girardeau, he started his teaching career as a high school English teacher and baseball coach in Baltimore, Maryland. He has also taught and lectured in England, the Netherlands, China, and Japan. Hamblin serves as associate editor of The Cape Rock and was poetry editor for Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature from 1984 to 2005. His books of poems include CROSSROADS: POEMS OF A MISSISSIPPI CHILDHOOD, KEEPING SCORE: SPORTS POEMS FOR EVERY SEASON, and and Mind the Gap: Poems by an American in London.