Source : Hindustan Times
Poet Sudeep Sen writes about his personal cricketing memories
Apart from the expected non-fiction titles, there are outstanding books on cricket poetry too — A Breathless Hush: The MCC Anthology of Cricket Verse by Hubert Doggart and David Rayvern Allen, and A Tingling Catch: A Century of New Zealand Cricket Poems 1864–2009, edited by Mark Pirie — are two examples. Harold Pinter, Les Murray, Roy Harper and A E Houseman are among the well-known modern poets who have written verse on cricket. Andrew Lang’s cricketing parody of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Brahma’ is “memorable” too.
My own modest contribution — apart from playing cricket in school and para (neighbourhood) — is an extract from my book, Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins) which reads: “At Edinburgh’s Carlton Cricket Pavilion, we sat / … [watching] how the sixth seam swung unpredictably and / the ball kept low, as were the runs, over after over. … // if the world were a game / of limited-over cricket, there would almost always / be a result in the end, except of course in the case / of a tie.” (from the poem, ‘Over May Day’).
I have innumerable personal cricketing memories — so many hundreds of waking hours secretly listening to static-ridden short-wave radio-commentary broadcasts as a child — taking my father to the home of world cricket, MCC and the Lord’s Cricket Ground. At the latter, during the lunch break of a county match between Middlesex and Sussex, he stepped out from behind the white picket fence onto the greens, caressed the closely mown grass turf, and exclaimed — here is where ‘the 3Ws: Walcott, Weekes, Worrell’ thrashed the English team.
Apart from the expected non-fiction titles, there are outstanding books on cricket poetry too — A Breathless Hush: The MCC Anthology of Cricket Verse by Hubert Doggart and David Rayvern Allen, and A Tingling Catch: A Century of New Zealand Cricket Poems 1864–2009, edited by Mark Pirie — are two examples. Harold Pinter, Les Murray, Roy Harper and A E Houseman are among the well-known modern poets who have written verse on cricket. Andrew Lang’s cricketing parody of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Brahma’ is “memorable” too.
My own modest contribution — apart from playing cricket in school and para (neighbourhood) — is an extract from my book, Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins) which reads: “At Edinburgh’s Carlton Cricket Pavilion, we sat / … [watching] how the sixth seam swung unpredictably and / the ball kept low, as were the runs, over after over. … // if the world were a game / of limited-over cricket, there would almost always / be a result in the end, except of course in the case / of a tie.” (from the poem, ‘Over May Day’).
I have innumerable personal cricketing memories — so many hundreds of waking hours secretly listening to static-ridden short-wave radio-commentary broadcasts as a child — taking my father to the home of world cricket, MCC and the Lord’s Cricket Ground. At the latter, during the lunch break of a county match between Middlesex and Sussex, he stepped out from behind the white picket fence onto the greens, caressed the closely mown grass turf, and exclaimed — here is where ‘the 3Ws: Walcott, Weekes, Worrell’ thrashed the English team.
