by Richard Subber | Feb 13, 2024 | My poetry, Poetry
quiet is what it was…
Sea quell
The immensity
shrinks to my gaze, and is still,
and the silence grows.
Duck Harbor Beach
Wellfleet, MA
September 9, 2019
Sitting on the sand at Duck Harbor Beach,
the bay was making absolutely no noise, it was dead quiet.
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle…
Colin Woodard makes it easier to understand…(book review)
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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”
Your comments are welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.
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by Richard Subber | Feb 10, 2024 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature
aspirations, vagrant needs…
Book review:
The Paris Wife
by Paula McLain
New York: Ballantine Books, 2011
320 pages
Paula McLain has done it artfully. The Paris Wife is a richly nuanced account of the transformation of the 1921 marriage of Hadley Richardson and Ernest Hemingway, the first for each of them.
I had not known in detail that Hemingway was as much of an inconstant lover as he actually was.
Now I know that Paula McLain tells me as much as I need to know about the life-interrupting aspirations of Hadley, and more than I care to know about the destructive potency of Hemingway’s vagrant needs.
Excerpt (Hadley is speaking):
“[Ernest] needed me to make him feel safe…yes, the same way I needed him. But he also liked that he could disappear into his work, away from me. And return when he wanted to.”
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Remember the Tallahatchie Bridge?
Molly Johnson sings it right…
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 | Feb 8, 2024 | Language, My poetry, Poetry
night songs
Singing
We explore our song of love,
with words that find our joys,
we trace our rhythms and a key,
we make new verses,
solve new rhymes,
and whisper codas in the dark,
and murmur of beginnings
as we drift to sleep.
February 28, 2023
For Barb, my dearest one
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Old Friends (book review)
Tracy Kidder really tells truth about old age…
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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 | Feb 6, 2024 | Book reviews, Books, History, Human Nature, World history
the byways of evolution…
Book review:
Cave of Bones
by Lee Berger and John Hawks
Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2023
235 pages
We haven’t been alone since forever, more or less.
It’s way too easy to adopt the common misunderstanding that humans are soooo exceptional, uniquely better than all the other animals.
The emphasis is on “unique,” at the apex of a singular progression throughout all of our history.
It ain’t necessarily so.
Cave of Bones is full of countervailing evidence: Homo naledi in south Africa were building fires, burying their dead, and scratching lines on cave walls at about the same time—200,000 to 300,000 years ago—as early members of Homo sapiens were doing the same things.
Paleoanthropologist Lee Berger affirms that Homo naledi didn’t look like us, and were a separate species and “by almost any definition…not human.” Nevertheless, in the Rising Star cave system he and his team members found charcoal and armfuls of fossil bones and scratch marks and a rock shaped like a tool, all confirming that naledi left evidence of their human-like activities, and, yes, culture.
In his introduction, Berger confides a sobering reality: “We explore the places where things have died.” I’m glad I didn’t do that in my career work.
Read Cave of Bones cover to cover. Learn some interesting stuff.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: Lafayette by Harlow Unger
He was a great man. Also rich and lucky.
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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by Richard Subber | Feb 4, 2024 | Human Nature, Power and inequality, Tidbits
many may wear the crown…
“Many kings have sat down upon the ground;
and one that was never thought of
hath worn the crown.”
Book of Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), 10:5, KJV
If you think you’re so smart and important, try telling your neighbor’s dog what to do.
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: “The Gentle Boy”
The Puritans, they had a dark side…
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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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