The Book Frog

Poetry is a fine art. The carefully wrought words of a Shakespeare, of a Keats, of a Wordsworth, of a Dickinson...these are not to be taken lightly. It might seem that my boy Wallace Stevens simply tossed off the lines "Among twenty snowy mountains/The only moving thing/Was the eye of the blackbird" before giving them to his secretary at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company to type up, but there's no doubt that he labored over and reworked them many times before they became the first stanza of Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. As well, I've no doubt that I could write for the rest of my life and never come up with anything as beautiful. And yet, just as a garden gnome, while certainly not on a par with the David of Michelangelo, can be art when placed, well, artfully, and in the proper setting, so with words. O Holy Cow! The Selected Verse of Phil Rizzuto, compiled and arranged by Tom Peyer and Hart Seely, is found poetry at its most sublime. Phil Rizzuto--"The Scooter"--was a shortstop who spent his entire career with the New York Yankees, first as a player and later as the radio and TV voice of the team. His commentary-- rambling, often stream of conscious, always liberally peppered with his catch phrase, "Holy Cow!" was also,when arranged just so on the page, strangely beautiful. Try this: Field of Butterflies Absolutely! If you don't get a little, A few butterflies, No matter what you do, On the first day of anything, You're not human. Or how about: Asylum Got some chocolate-chip cookies here Murcer. So don't ask me any questions For a batter or so. All right? Okay, I admit that to read O Holy Cow! as poetry one has to have a highly developed sense of whimsy and a willingness to take a Zen leap and simply be one with it. If you do, though, you will be rewarded with rare gems and things on every page that make you go "Hmm".