Jackie Robinson’s Real Gone: Baseball Poems of New York
Matthew Johnson/Cornerstone Press/2026/90pp/IBSN: 9781968148669
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“I’ll write about things and places and people I have loved … Ebbets Field, Jackie Robinson. A baseball team.”
Roger Kahn, The Boys of Summer
“Did you see Jackie Robinson hit that ball? …
Yes, yes, Jackie’s real gone.”
Buddy Johnson, “Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?”
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In the beginning, there was baseball.
I remember almost nothing recreational before that – except dolls. But dolls were more my friends than my toys. I would dress them in their best and line them up across our couch, then turn on the radio at gametime. They would listen as raptly as I did, I as raptly as they did. Even my mother, though busy with caring for all of us – my father, my brother, me, our cat, and her own parents (who lived with us, distrusted the radio, and disapproved of Godless recreations) … Even my mother would find reasons to bustle about the living room throughout games. In and out – broomstick or dustcloth or soapy dish in hand – “What’s happening?” she would demand when static-muffled uproar reached her ears. “Who scored?” Heavy silence, then, cautiously (though she had been keeping track and must have already known): “Who’s ahead?”
Our family was not unique: Everyone seemed to talk baseball throughout the season, then immediately start speculating about next season. During the World Series, school always let out early so that the kids could scamper home to change clothes, assemble gobble-trays of popcorn and Coca Colas, and not risk missing a minute of the game. Kids whose mothers worked away from home all day at “jobs” (I didn’t know any such kids personally) could stay behind all afternoon in an emptied classroom, listening to the broadcast.
I didn’t know that baseball had been invented – that it had not always been with us like starlit night skies and other natural marvels. I still cannot imagine a childhood, let alone a lifetime, without it. And I still miss the OLD baseball – real baseball – played in the sunshine as (my mother would have said) the Good Lord intended.
But let me be clear: the Brooklyn Dodgers – who played in Ebbets Field, downstate from our home in Schenectady – were Godsent to us (well, to all New Yorkers), we could be sure. In the end, somehow, they might always triumph. Nearly always did. The Brooklyn Dodgers. Our Dodgers. And when Walter O’Malley, who owned the team, took it (renamed) to Los Angeles in 1957, the games went on, but for old New Yorkers, the spirit was gone.
Personally, I never quite felt the passion and the pride, the unearned assumption of “ownership,” and, yes, the love that my parents felt for the Brooklyn Dodgers. But I came close years later when our family moved north of Chicago and my sons played football in high school, then later in college. Now having been taught by them to be a fan of that sport, I watched games played by the great Chicago Bears – Walter Payton, Mike Singletary, Dave Duerson, Kevin Butler, others. And – though the sport was different – the daring, the heart, the discipline, and the pure joy/pure grief of great athletes elevated and frightened me again.
And I thought about baseball.
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I didn’t know where to start this review, and I don’t know where to end it. Dozens of players, teams, and great moments are memorialized here by Matthew Johnson, who was unfamiliar to me before I read this book and now is unforgettable. Every poem is fully realized – deeply felt, richly imaged, uniquely memorable. Each one stands alone while also merging into the panoply that Matthew Johnson has created.
Reading these, we experience – at second-hand, of course, yet keenly – the stress of extreme exertion, the elation of winning, the dark plunge of losing, the drive to try again … and again. But I think I expected that. Equally important and more surprising (to me, at least) is Johnson’s unblinking exposure of the pain that can closely trail fame – and of the racism that infected the lives and careers of even the most storied Black players. Johnson memorializes these players going all the way back to the Negro Leagues during segregation and forward to our day – wistful memorials sweet with nostalgia, strong with respect, and wrenching with their “pastness,” their irrecoverability. Who has not looked back through life and felt longings like these – from Johnson’s poem, “I Dream the Dodgers Back to Brooklyn”:
I want the Dodgers back in Brooklyn.
Real Brooklyn with pigeon-coop rooftops
And stickball kids who cuss in five languages while at lunch.
I want Jackie back, stealing home like it’s owed to him,
As if America is just a constant curveball,
And you’ve got no choice but to go for it.
I just want Jackie to be safe after a long day of running.
I want a hot dog in each hand,
And a halo of ketchup around my mouth,
I want Ebbets Field, not a memory,
But brick and echoes and peanuts cracked by hand,
And bleachers packed like rush-hour trains,
Filled with old ladies heckling like prophets.
I want to believe in losing again,
The kind a Yankees fan could never understand,
The kind where you have scraped a knee
And often been told, no, over and over again.
Whose heart was broken when the Dodgers left Brooklyn,
And see him fall in love all over again…
Matthew Johnson begins his energetic, loving and lovely book by memorializing two Black players of legend: Moses Fleetwood Anderson, who broke baseball’s color barrier on May 1, 1884 – playing catcher for the Toledo Blue Stockings; and Ernie Banks, who played for Kansas City in the Negro Leagues before his 19-year storied career with the Chicago Cubs, 1953-71. He closes it by reminding us that great sport lives – that great effort rewards – and every child should have a cap and a bat (or a ball or a racket or two skates or a jump rope or…). Every child should have a chance to enjoy being physically alive, to win and to lose, face down defeat and reach victory. And then do it all again – and again – and…
I have barely begun to explain what Matthew Johnson has given us: the imagined voices of dozens of boys and men who desired, strove, had dreams, and dared to follow them.
Yet I haven’t mentioned my favorite part of the book: its final page. Centered on it are two photographs: one of a little boy, one of a young man, each in cap and t-shirt, each standing in sunshine and holding a bat. Both depict Matthew Johnson. Ready to swing.
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Reviewer Mary Biggs is a retired English professor, and has written numerous short stories, essays and articles, and a book on contemporary American poetry. Mary has also served as an editor and consultant on several literary magazines and a legendary small press, The Spirit That Moves Us, for which she co-edited two collections of new fiction and poetry.
