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From “Challenging Chronos:
The Sports Poetry of David Allan Evans”
by Philip Dacey
Evans achieves universality by converting his interest in sports into a meditation upon a primary datum facing mankind: mortality and the experience of time. He understands that athletes and their bodies serve well to signify the story of man’s accommodation to the toll time necessarily takes. The powers of architects, biologists, lawyers, chefs, and painters don’t have to diminish with age; on the contrary, age often enhances those powers remarkably. But, Satchel Paige notwithstanding, the same can usually not be said for athletes, nor should it be, as athleticism for the most part celebrates the human body at the peak of its development, in full power, facing the inevitable decline but not yet subject to it. Evans as poet can therefore be said to explore the most serious implications of sporting activity. He clearly and steadily sees sport not as a mere pastime nor yet as a cheap and misleading metaphor for life (as in, “There are winners and losers in life just as there are in sports”) but as the very thing its elflife heightened and dramatized, given special form and meaning. Poetry, of course, is a representation, while being itself also. In a wellexecuted poem, the poet attains a peak analogous to the peak an athlete might attain at a given moment; the nature of art allows the balance, once struck, to be held. Through the artful performance of his poetry, David Allan Evans stays forever just clearing the bar, not falling.
sports poems