The Complete Poems of Sarah Orne Jewett (book review)

The Complete Poems of Sarah Orne Jewett (book review)

good story telling…

 

 

Book review:

The Complete Poems of Sarah Orne Jewett

 

by Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909)

New York: Ironweed Press, 1999

85 pages

 

It is a solid, pleasant experience to read the poems of Sarah Orne Jewett.

Mostly her imagery in The Complete Poems is not exalted, and mostly her insights are not life-changing, but she is a compelling story teller and she invites the reader to see what she sees.

That’s good.

Some excerpts:

 

“And so, across the empty miles

   Light from my star shines. Is it, dear,

Your love has never gone away?

   I said farewell and—kept you here”

From “Together”

———————————————-

“The nearest daisies looked at me

   Because they heard me call;

And they told each other what I had said,

  Though they did not hear it all.

And I stood there wishing for you,

   All alone on the hill;

While far below were the fields asleep,

   And above, the sky so still.”

From “A Night in June”

———————————————-

“I saw the worn rope idle hang

   Beside me in the belfry brown.

I gave the bell a solemn toll—

   I rang the knell for Gosport town.”

From “On Star Island”

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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.

 

A glimpse of the millennial dawn…

witness to the song of the sea…

a nature poem

Chanson de mer

click here

Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”

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The Man Who Broke Capitalism (book review)

The Man Who Broke Capitalism (book review)

the many meanings of “shareholder value”…

 

 

Book review:

The Man Who Broke Capitalism:

How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland

and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—

        and How to Undo His Legacy

 

by David Gelles

New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022

264 pages

 

Gelles has written a dreadfully important expose of the evolution of the disastrous idolatry of “maximizing shareholder value” and funneling more and more of America’s corporate wealth to the relatively small cadre of executives and directors and financiers who took advantage of it to line their own pockets and deny economic success to just about everyone else.

Of course, Gelles doesn’t say that Jack Welch was the only one who did it. For my taste, the title of the book is a distraction from the truth: America’s financial elite have misappropriated the industrial wealth of the country.

The Man Who Broke Capitalism concludes with a broadly detailed array of governmental policies that would remediate the disaster that Jack Welch and the Chicago school of economists and so many others created to be a substitute for the notion that a corporation is a creature of our society, and is best understood as a conduit for creating goods, creating wealth, and widely distributing both.

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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.

 

Book review: Ethan Frome

it’s about not being satisfied with less…

by Edith Wharton

click here

Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”

*   *   *   *   *   *

Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction (book review)

Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction (book review)

Essential, readable, provocative…

 

 

Book review:

Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction

 

1st and 2nd editions

Michael Perman, ed.

1st Edition: Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath and Company, 1991, 598 pp.

2nd Edition: Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998, 460 pp.

 

Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction is a tantalizing collection of contemporary documents and complementary essays by modern writers.

Perman has assembled “essential, readable, and provocative” commentaries on the catastrophes of the Civil War and Reconstruction in the middle of the 19th century.

Maybe you know a lot about that time and those events. You’ll learn more from this commendably interesting and surprisingly insightful book.

Take the time to read both editions of Major Problems—both editions are equally valuable, with almost wholly different selections.

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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.

 

Book review: Shawshank Redemption

It’s a world I do not want to know…

by Stephen King

click here

My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 53 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”

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“…the journey is always different…”…(”Whither…” my poem)

“…the journey is always different…”…(”Whither…” my poem)

my restless eye

 

 

Whither…

 

I do not see the next turn in my road.

 

I know there will be choosing,

I know that I cannot turn

   both left and right

      as need there be,

that some roads

   will be traveled only once,

that in my living

   I may turn back, betimes,

but the journey is always different

   in the second passage.

 

The known past dims,

and my unknown future

   will brighten with every dawn,

and I know there is no certain map

   of my next steps—

I am content to round the next turn,

and so to look ahead

   to spy the turning

      that invites my restless eye.

 

January 12, 2020

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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.

 

Book review: The Cradle Place

by Thomas Lux

poems wrapped in a wet rag…

click here

Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”

 

Your comments are welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.

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Tales from a Free-Range Childhood (book review)

Tales from a Free-Range Childhood (book review)

…reserved but spritely humorous…

 

 

Book review:

Tales from a Free-Range Childhood

 

by Donald Davis (b1944)

Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, Publisher, 2011

239 pages

 

Davis is a renowned storyteller, in person and in print.

He offers very believable recollections of his childhood in this exceptionally prosaic collection.

Tales from a Free-Range Childhood is a pleasing succession of reserved but spritely humorous accounts of the kind of joys and scrapes that you probably experienced, mostly.

Davis knows how to put it into words.

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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.

Fire in the Lake (book review)

you should have read it in 1972…

by Frances FitzGerald

click here

As with another eye: Poems of exactitude with 55 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”

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