by Richard Subber | May 18, 2023 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Theater and play reviews
The love positively erupts…
Book/movie review:
Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Starring Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal
Director: Ang Lee
Won Oscars for Directing, Music, and Writing/Screenplay
Based on the short story by Annie Proulx, screenplay by Larry McMurtry
Here’s the big bad spoiler: it’s a love story. It has cowboys. It has scenic mountains. It has pickup trucks and horses and big empty spaces. What could be more all-American?
Annie Proulx and Larry McMurtry make good chemistry in Brokeback Mountain. Ennis and Jack slowly realize they can boil.
The love positively erupts. It’s a stunning revelation, there is gentleness later, and disappointment that can’t be contained. There is real love, you cannot be in doubt about that, and there are the hobbling constraints that Jack and Ennis cannot overcome.
In the end, the world outside their world won’t let them be different, and happy.
In the end, too many women are victims. Jack and Ennis can’t give up on each other, but they can abandon the women who love them.
In the end, there is a bloodied shirt that is a delicate memento linking Ennis to Jack, a painfully inadequate manifestation of the many wounds they bore, and the hurts they inflicted on each other.
In the end, there is Brokeback Mountain,
there is a big empty space where love should be,
after too many fragile opportunities have already passed by.
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Movie review. Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2018 All rights reserved.
New England Encounters (book review)
…the complex relations between Indians and colonists
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In other words: Poems for your eyes and ears with 64 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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by Richard Subber | May 16, 2023 | Language, My poetry, Poetry
The pushing, potent, heaving…
Poesy
This is, nearly, what it’s like.
Magma flowing cool, I think,
is nearly right,
the swelling flow,
quite nearly right.
The pushing, potent,
familiar overflowing burden,
is quite nearly truly right.
The heaving rush in one clean moment,
of one clean, bursting, raptured ideal,
it speaks the straining gush of simple words
that stream around and through,
cool fire sparking
as they merge and touch
and match and lodge together.
This is nearly, quite truly,
nearly certain,
quite nearly right.
April 3, 1996
Sanibel Island, Florida
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
How does a poem end?
“Finis,” my thoughts (my poem)
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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”
Your comments are welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.
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by Richard Subber | May 14, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Joys of reading, Revolutionary War
…John Adams,
in the thick of it…
Book review:
John Adams
by David McCullough (1933-2022)
Simon & Schuster, New York, 2001
751 pages
Maybe you’re like me. Maybe you don’t think biography is the best way to do history. David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize-winner is a reason to change your mind a bit.
John Adams, simply, is a really good book. McCullough helps you to warm up to this American icon and to his personal experience in leading the American Revolution and the first formative years of the American republic.
Adams, our first vice president and second president, was among the few who were in the thick of it from the beginning, and he never shrank from doing what he expansively viewed as his duty to his new country.
McCullough’s prose is a delightful experience for the serious historian and for the armchair dabbler who likes a good read. From cover to cover, John Adams is a lush, genuine presentation of a man, his loved ones, his career, his commitment to do good works and his never-flagging appreciation that the object of government should be to do the people’s business and make possible a decent life for all.
Adams, of course, couldn’t stop himself from being a politician, and he wasn’t the nicest kind.
The Alien and Sedition Acts were among the lowest points of American politics.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: Who Built America?
…including people
who got their hands dirty
by Christopher Clark and Nancy Hewitt
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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”
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by Richard Subber | May 11, 2023 | Language, My poetry, Poetry, Reflections
no magic mumbling…
Repeat
Here, in the back of the cave,
it’s not called magic,
nor potion, nor spell,
there is no careful brew…
The ensorcelling fire burns,
but no spell is called up
to right grave wrongs,
no magic mumbling
slips from the witch’s lip.
The crone intent on sharing
ere her lamp goes dim,
the novice, come to learn,
seeks a charm that ends all pain…
The witch sits down
and wipes her eye,
and teaches, again,
that the spell to make
possible what is good
is not magic,
but she names it
with one strong word:
“hope”
December 8, 2020
Inspired by “Spell for Ending Well” by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, posted December 7, 2020, on her website: A Hundred Falling Veils
Excerpt:
“…Any spell
for ending well
knows…
that anyone who would look up
a spell for ending well
already has exactly what they need.”
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Starving with a tiger…
Pogo says you better watch out…
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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”
Your comments are welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.
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by Richard Subber | May 9, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Human Nature, Politics
we ask too much…
Book review:
What It Is Like to Go to War
by Karl Marlantes
New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011
256 pages
There are two kinds of readers who can presume to learn something from Marlantes’ second book, What It Is Like to Go to War: those who have combat experience, and those who don’t.
I guess you will feel just about every emotion while you’re reading it.
Of course we ask too much of our men and women who go to war.
Of course, sadly, we don’t know how to say “thank you” and we find it hard to figure out how to say “you don’t have to tell us everything you did, unless you want to.”
Of course we don’t say often enough “you’re still a good person.”
Marlantes’ first book was Matterhorn, a robustly intuitive assessment of the mind and experience of a warfighter.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
A poet is a “maker”
…and it doesn’t have to rhyme…
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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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