Aisle 228 by Sandra Marchetti
Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2023
Both poetry and baseball are human endeavors of faith and persistence, requiring devotion, optimism, patience, and practice. Sandra Marchetti’s Aisle 228, named after the section of Wrigley Field where she would attend Cubs games with her father, is a memoir made up of collected, often crucial moments in a timeline for the ascendancy of an underdog team. Divided into two sections—“Losers” and “Winners”—it particularly resonated with this reviewer, who grew up in the shadow of Shea Stadium, drawn to the energy and fluctuating fortunes of the Mets.
The book opens with “Frame” and the palpable drama of the game, hope summoned in the vista of the stadium:
Tucked in the western grandstand imagine
Wrigley: a sliver of light, orange-greenbeams gone between Golden Arches
as scoreboard plates clink in place.
This is not a good season, “yet players lope over this green hill / and our minds agree to rise / and clap for them.”
A spiritual connection to the game comes through in several poems, including the reward for patience and hope found in the “anticipatory glow” of a television screen in a restaurant’s darkened dining room (“Extras”). “The Unsayable” expresses the ritualistic faith of fans (as the subtitle reminds the reader that the Chicago Cubs went 108 years between World Series championships), and tests their trust as it asks:
If it never happened,
would we go on buying
the season tickets, scuffling
through turnstiles, slowed
at the bag check?
. . .
If it never happened,
would we still applaud
the blue pennant tentative
to ascend the flagpole
after a series’ win?
The reverential tradition and religious devotion to the game is evoked in “Praise”:
Clutch the railing up the steps,
shuffle to your pew. Sing
two, a third if blessed. Whisper
cathedral, then profess.The organ keys strike three,
abide by the trinity. On Sunday
dressed our best, we crowd around
the beaming green and rise as one
spirits the blue.
A poem with an irresistible title, “Pete Rose and Ichiro Meet in Baseball Heaven or at a Card Show” elevates the scandalized Rose in an afterlife encounter of the two great pitchers:
After Hustle’s laughter
wears off, their orbits
align. Ballcap to black sun-
glasses, criminalized
and sainted, inscrutable.
God watches their gaze
settle up the middle.
The hallowed cathedral of an old ballpark is given graceful homage in “1060 W. Addison,” the address of Wrigley Field, a dream-like paean to a place where one can relive early adventure:
Our childhoods hang
like ghosts in the aisles
waiting on us
to ascend the stairs,
snatch, and wear them.Little haunt, this
was the first heart
break we knew.
We breathe the air
and are gone.
The poignancy of “America’s Pastime” is captured in many of these poems, as Marchetti places a lens on baseball’s powerful personal and nostalgic resonance. In spare and evocative images, we share a childhood memory/rite of passage in “A Nine-Year Old Girl Watches the 1993 World Series”:
That square of unimaginable
Green, his leap over a cloud.Out of a red cap, curls
tumbled with sweat beads.Color patches beamed from
the box in our toy room;
I craned my neck to see joy—
Aisle 228 is an engaging, evocative, and eloquent collection that ties sport history to coming-of-age experience and would appeal to poetry fans as well as to baseball afficionados.
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Mindy Kronenberg is an award-winning poet and writer with numerous publication credits worldwide. She teaches writing, literature, and arts subjects at SUNY Empire State University, is the editor of Oberon poetry magazine, and the author of Dismantling the Playground (Birnham Wood), Images of America: Miller Place (Arcadia), and OPEN, an illustrated poetry book (Clare Songbirds Publishers).