by Richard Subber | Apr 29, 2025 | My poetry, Poetry
always in transition…
moonish
A wasted wafer
wanes in
the low morning sky,
waiting for the end of day,
waiting to be the moon again.
October 20, 2024
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: Lord of the Flies
Never more relevant…
by William Golding
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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”
Your comments are welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.
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by Richard Subber | Apr 26, 2025 | Book reviews, Books, Joys of reading, Language
Romantic historical fiction doesn’t get any better…
Consider the art of Rafael Sabatini (1875-1950)
Novelist extraordinaire
Sabatini was a more popular writer during his lifetime, when his trademark works of romantic, principled historical fiction were more accessible and more acceptable. If you have not read Scaramouche, you have deprived yourself. You will feel yourself to be a better, more lavishly happy person after you read it for the first time. There is the occasional swordplay in his novels, however, I warn you, most of the time his characters do nothing but talk. I think that’s all you need for a book review.
My interest here is to share a sample of his ingenious and engaging prose. This is from Saint Martin’s Summer...in fact, these are the first two paragraphs of the first chapter:
“My Lord of Tressan, His Majesty’s Seneschal of Dauphiny, sat at his ease, his purple doublet all undone, to yield greater freedom to his vast bulk, a yellow silken undergarment visible through the gap, as is visible the flesh of some fruit that, swollen with over-ripeness, has burst its skin.
“His wig—imposed upon him by necessity, not fashion—lay on the table amid a confusion of dusty papers, and on his little fat nose, round and red as a cherry at its end, rested the bridge of his horn-rimmed spectacles. His bald head—so bald and shining that it conveyed an unpleasant sense of nakedness, suggesting that its uncovering had been an act of indelicacy on the owner’s part—rested on the back of his great chair, and hid from sight the gaudy escutcheon wrought upon the crimson leather. His eyes were closed, his mouth open, and whether from that mouth or from his nose—or, perhaps, conflicting for issue between both—there came a snorting, rumbling sound to proclaim that my Lord the Seneschal was hard at work upon the King’s business.”
Maybe that’s all you need for a book review.
Eat your heart out, John Grisham.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: American Colonies
So many and so much
came before the Pilgrims
by Alan Taylor
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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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by Richard Subber | Apr 24, 2025 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Reflections
it’s not the last obscenity…
Book review:
Aging: An Apprenticeship
Nan Narboe, ed.
Portland, OR: Red Notebook Press, 2018
286 pages
Narboe creates a handy and wide-ranging collection of reflections on the art, science, and humanity of the aging process. More than 50 authors tell it like they think it is, for folks nearing the increasingly ordinary age of 50, and for folks in their 50s, 60s, 70s , 80s, and 90s and beyond. If you’re not in one of those groups, you will be sooner than you think.
Of course, the explicit premise of most of the authors in Aging: An Apprenticeship is that life can be good (or not), aging happens to everyone, and dying is the end game.
Gloria Steinem’s contribution is on point, completely tolerable, and instructive. She says:
“After all, we are communal creatures who must mirror each other to know who we are. Every living thing ages and dies, yet humans seem to be the only species that thinks about aging and thinks about dying. Surely, we are meant to use this ability, especially in a country that suffers so much from concealing aging and dying as if they were the last obscenities.”
For Aging: An Apprenticeship, Narboe collects essays that range from whimsical to doggone serious. Each author offers a very personal argument that aging and dying are 100% natural.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
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Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 73 free verse 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 | Apr 22, 2025 | Human Nature, My poetry, Poetry
the dusty baby seats…
Baby seats
I’m eating breakfast
in a room
half-filled with old folks,
they need four score of candles
on the birthday cake,
they remember old, old songs,
sometimes all the words,
they’ve lost the dearest ones
they married,
they blubber and laugh
when the grandkids come,
and they slowly eat their breakfast
with old friends,
and they never see
the dusty baby seats
that fill a tidy corner
and wait for the generation
that will happily use them.
September 19, 2024
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
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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”
Your comments are welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.
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by Richard Subber | Apr 20, 2025 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Revolutionary War
King George wanted to win the war…
the other guys, not so much…
Book review:
Iron Tears:
America’s Battle for Freedom,
Britain’s Quagmire: 1775:1783
Stanley Weintraub (1929-2019)
New York: Free Press, 2005
375 pages
For some time I have indulged my suspicion that the British never really tried very hard to win the Revolutionary War.
Stanley Weintraub’s Iron Tears isn’t the first book that has reinforced my understanding of this most iconic event in American history. If you’re interested, try Nick Bunker’s An Empire on the Edge or Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy’s An Empire Divided.
Weintraub offers a solidly researched and richly anecdotal account of the military details and the political wrangling that prolonged the war for several years until the British ministers and politicians finally admitted to themselves that they couldn’t win the war.
King George III was fatuously optimistic and persistently unrealistic—to the bitter end—about the prospects for winning a war that he desperately identified with his own persona and his royal stature.
Weintraub makes it irrefutably clear that at no time during the Revolutionary War did the British send enough men and ships to win in North America, that is, to put down the rebellion and re-establish full constitutional Parliamentary control of the 13 colonies. Hint: the British “sugar island” colonies in the Caribbean were more important, and the British never stopped looking over their shoulders at prospective and real war with France, Spain, and other countries.
On October 18, 1781, General Washington accepted the capitulation of the army of General Cornwallis at Yorktown. On November 25, an official dispatch with the bad news finally reached Lord North, the British prime minister, at Downing Street. It is reported that he exclaimed “Oh God! It is all over!”
Quite possibly he was overcome with grief and relief.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: A Cold Welcome
The culprit was global cooling,
500 years ago…
by Sam White
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Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 73 free verse 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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