OPENING DAYS
Sports Poems
edited by Lee Bennett Hopkins & illustrated by Scott Medlock
The team behind Extra Innings (1993), a book of baseball poems, widens their coverage of sports with this collection of 18 pieces of verse as nimble as their subjects. Particularly pleasing: Gary Soto's intimate, clever vignette on weight lifting; Walt Whitman's words on a runner's stride; Ray Wesson's miniature ode to exhaustion (``My feet/And seat/Are beat''), and Milton Bracker's witty exultation of baseball's opening day. Not every piece is gold—Jane Yolen makes mush of karate—but the book is never compromised. The imagery in Medlock's bright, heroic paintings ably captures the mood and energy of the poems. (Picture book/poetry. 8-12)