Liam Ferney’s Australian cricket poem

When I was in Brisbane for Subverse: Queensland Poetry Festival in 2000 and 2001, I met the young Australian poet Liam Ferney.

I can’t remember now how cricket came up but it soon entered our conversation. Liam was talking about having seen the New Zealand cricket team practicing in Brisbane. He liked Stephen Fleming of the New Zealand batsmen. Liam had the task of introducing my session at Subverse 2001. He also had the task of picking my fellow colleagues and me up from the airport. It's nice to get a ride when you don't know where you're going.

When I was editing JAAM magazine, I published a cricket-related poem by Liam. It’s an unusual poem. It plays with history using baseball and cricket. Baseball star Babe Ruth has an epigraph at the start and with mythical cricket figures Don Bradman and Harold Larwood (from the Ashes’ Bodyline series) appearing as baseball players recreating history:

LIAM FERNEY

The Sultan of Swat

‘Why don’t you read the papers?

 It’s all right there in the papers.’

                                    — Babe Ruth

Waking, wiping the

sleep from his eye, he

reaches for his pills.

Reading the label on the bottle:

it seems to say:            

‘don’t try too hard just

             let it carry you’ –

             like… a river, he finishes,

                        the sentence and his pills.

It’s prescribed like this

because mythology inadvertently

gets mixed up in the games

of chinese whispers

                                    we play with our history.

Drunk on fairy floss and beer

the story they’re telling in

Sideshow Alley is that Don Bradman,

fulfilling a promise to a

terminally ill child,

points straight back over

            Larwood’s head at a spot

      somewhere in centre field.

Winding up Larwood

          gives it everything he’s got,

   to the screaming ecstasy and

spilt beer of the Chicago fans,

            but  even as the ball leaves his hand

      Bradman’s eyes are fixed upon it and,

                  with a flick of his wrist,

            he sends it soaring out of

                          Wrigley Field.

Larwood, sticky with humiliation,

imagines a ball rocketing into

the soft-flesh of the batsman’s

helmetless head as he walks

back to his mark.

Bradman, luxuriating in the profanities

and abuse he has evoked

watches an angry fan hurl a cup

of beer onto left field and spits

nonchalantly just missing the fielder

at short leg.

Larwood turns and Bradman, like

            a brave Achaen points back

      prophetically to the same spot.

    The bowler runs in like a fierce

       bull charging through the streets

  of Pamplona and digs it in short,

              a spear jagging up sharply,

    but our Achilles has wiser eyes than this

         stepping backward and away,

                        hooking awesomely

the ball

                seems to climb

to the sun.        

                       

The news story is packaged thus:

The footage of the shot

from a variety of angles,

an interview with humble Bradman,

fans saying how he’s the greatest

the world has ever seen and

then the fadeout:

the small child smiling from

his hospital bed,

this miracle breaks hearts

for joy at dinner tables

nationwide.

A kid finds one of the balls out in the street.

He hides it away in a box,

and forgets about it for years

until one day, for no reason

     that he can name,

  he starts to take it out at nights

and let its elegant stitching

   take him back to the cutgrass

    summer twilight that now

seems so important.

It is a fact:

    The Bambino grows in deed and

    stature with every passing year.

Poem © Liam Ferney

Liam went on to publish his debut poetry collection, Popular Mechanics, through Interactive Publications in Brisbane, 2004. He appeared in Best Australian Poems 2010 and was editor of Cordite Poetry Review 17-23 in Melbourne and guest editor of issue 34.

Cricket historian Don Neely once commented to me that if it wasn’t for rounders which became baseball, cricket would’ve swept across America in the 19th century. This makes Liam’s poem even more interesting. The US played Canada in 1844, the first ever international cricket match at the St George’s Cricket Club, Bloomingdale Park, Manhattan.

Baseball became popular during the American Civil War and cricket waned. Americans have never really gotten the gist of cricket since that time though more Americans today play cricket thanks to Indian and Sri Lankan communities in America. NZ played Sri Lanka in a one-day series in Florida recently. In LA, the Compton Cricket Club (“the Homies and the Pops”) has a colourful history since the mid-90s. They have even released cricket rap singles. Check out their page on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compton_Cricket_Club

In Jan-Feb 2011, Compton Cricket Club will tour Australia, the first American cricket club to tour there.

There is now an American cricket magazine, American Cricketer, worth checking out as well: http://www.americancricketer.com/

Article © Mark Pirie 2010

(Sources: Wikipedia – the free encyclopedia; conversation with Don Neely; JAAM 15 (JAAM Publishing Collective, May 2001))