What a huckleberry Shelf Awareness was! In yesterday's brief
tribute to Phil Rizzuto, former New York Yankees star and
announcer, who died on Monday at 89, we weren't on the ball, as it
were. Quite a few readers wrote in to tell us about several books that
relate to the "Scooter."
Most important is O Holy Cow: The Selected Verse of Phil Rizzuto
edited by Tom Peyer and Hart Seely (Ecco, $11,
9780880015332/0880015330), a 1993 title that reproduces words spoken by
Rizzuto on the air in verse form, not unlike 2003's Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld
(but without the arrogance or nastiness!). The book is available;
Ecco plans to reissue it at the beginning of next season.
Ruth Liebmann of Random House noted that when she worked at Shakespeare
& Co. in New York City, the store sold hundreds of copies of O Holy Cow, and "for a nice while, Rizzuto was our bestselling poet."
Ruth also alerted us to former poet laureate Robert Pinsky's review of the book on publication in the New York Times in which he commended "a freshness and pointedness in his work that many poets of a more conventional kind fail to achieve."
Tall Havis Dawson of Liza Dawson Associates called O Holy Cow's poetry "wonderful--lyrical, quixotic, the aching beauty of everyday life as felt by a short-statured optimist."
Kevin Morrissey of Virginia Quarterly Review passed along some of his favorite entries in O Holy Cow. Two of them are from 1991 games:
Haiku
Ice, I can't stand it.
I cannot stand anything
Cold on my body.
The Prince
I.
Last night I was watching TV.
I was watching Arsenio Hall.
And he had Prince on.
I wanna--
What a character he is!
Holy cow!
II.
Entertainer.
Singer.
And he can dance.
He's a little bitty guy.
He had a weird beard.
I tell ya it was--
I couldn't explain it.
III.
It was a real beard.
I mean,
You know how they do it now.
Some of them.
It doesn't come all the way
Up to the sideburns.
It starts,
Then it goes.
You gotta see it to believe it.
---
And Bruce Jacobs of Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan., noted that there is a "rather indirect homage to Scooter in Mick Foley's novel by the same name," which appeared last September and is set in the Bronx in the late 1960s. For the play-by-play about Scooter (Vintage, $14.95, 9781400096800/1400096804), click here.