Patricia Goedicke | The Baseball Field at Night

Published: June 30, 2008

Missoula poet and University of Montana creative writing professor Patricia Goedicke died of lung cancer in 2006. Before her death, she completed her 13th collection of poems, The Baseball Field at Night.

Poet Ron Slate writes of the book: “Her final poems, spoken by someone regarding her own dying with a grim amazement, were cultivated by years of recognizing an enduring condition, the presence of death in motion or abeyance, the sound of suffering. Recognition, the poems say, is an action.”

“Nobody wants to cross an absolutely empty / baseball field at midnight” writes Goedicke in the title poem.

“Yet we follow her there, willingly, if with more caution,” says Slate. “Even in the end, she entertained and enlightened us, with a steady, unflinching energy, a surpassing glamour, and love.”

Her previous collection, As Earth Begins to End, was both her tribute to her husband, Leonard Robinson, and a searching, anguished meditation on diminution and death and what might outlast them. It was recognized by the American Library Association as one of the top ten poetry books of the year 2000. The new collection was published in February 2008 by Lost Horse Press, Sandpoint, ID, and sells for $16.95.