In THE FOOTBALL POET: Poetry of a Life’s Journey, Darryl Sampson—an athlete and coach-turned-economist—explores his lived experience in a variety of short forms. Not all of these forms are poetry, per se; several pieces (“Strength,” “Change,” “Only You,” etc.) are more like meditations on a word or concept; or, by turning explicitly towards God at some point, they read like prayers. This distinction is not merely one of content; rather, the meditation/prayer pieces lack the rhythmic and semantic structure of the more obvious poems in the collection. As such, these can’t really be evaluated as poems.
For their own part, however, the actual poems in THE FOOTBALL POET are often quite effective. The great diversity of formal structures allows the text to bounce from one idea to another without committing strictly to any individual one, and the result is a collection with some surprises around every corner. For instance, two of the most enjoyable reading experiences are the most explicitly rhythmic of the lot: “Atomic Dawg,” a highly structured, repetitive riff on a dawg/diggity dawg pair; and “Jazz It Up,” a lithe, bouncy exercise in scatting. THE FOOTBALL POET also succeeds in pieces like “Bengal Boys,” another more structured poem, this time in ABCB quatrains reading like a folk song; the device is straightforward, but having established that rhyming pattern, the final stanza gives a surprisingly solid kick when it deploys an ABCA rhyme instead. The book also has a few pieces that almost straddle the poem/meditation line, but they still work well: “On the Pond” is short and extremely simple, but its unusual, repeated line structure of doubled nouns with a pronounced o-shape (“Pond the lily pad. / Pond the stream.”) gives it a hypnotic imminence.
However, THE FOOTBALL POET does occasionally lose its grasp on language. In some instances, there seem to be missing words (“The warmth of your touch is what I long”). In others, an incorrect word form is employed (“The rich build skyscrapers to measure their vain”), or a related word is substituted in (“Clothes masquerade the body”). In a few instances, there are straightforward grammatical errors (“Eternal is our hearts”). Although poetry is free to play with rules of composition and grammar, these moments are unsupported by the text; at the very least, they’re problems in need of resolution, since they obscure meaning and introduce friction into the reading flow. The overall structure of the collection is also very loose. Though divided up into four “quarters,” there’s no evident thematic grouping or ordering to the pieces. On the contrary, similar (and seemingly linked) poems—like the aforementioned “Atomic Dawg” and “Jazz It Up”—are often found on opposite ends of the book or scattered throughout. Overall, there is still room for improvement here: tightening up some of the language in each individual piece, and more thoughtfully arranging those pieces for best effect (or dropping the “quarters” entirely, since they suggest a structure that isn’t evident in the text itself).
THE FOOTBALL POET is not consistently strong, and an experienced reader of poetry will know that it isn’t breaking ground in terms of technique. It could even evince a better grasp of the techniques it does successfully employ. But THE FOOTBALL POET is nonetheless a satisfying read with a few pleasant surprises along the way.
Darryl Sampson’s THE FOOTBALL POET: Poetry of a Life’s Journey doesn’t demonstrate a comprehensive grasp of technique, but it is enlivened by a playful diversity of form and a few moments of real excellence.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader