by Richard Subber | Mar 30, 2021 | Book reviews, Books, Joys of reading, Language, Poetry, Reviews of other poets
even baseball in the dark…
Home Team: Poems About Baseball
by Edwin Romond
West Hartford, CT: Grayson Books, 2018
You really don’t have to be a baseball fan to feel the joy that just won’t quit in Romond’s offering of romantic poems about baseball.
I mean romantic in the sense of the 19th century Romantic Era, when practitioners in most of the arts were focused on the many dimensions of intense emotion and esthetic experience.
You will discover that Romond’s poetry has so much of longing, and recognition, and acceptance, and the joys we can find in everyday life, and Home Team has many versions of all that.
My favorite is “Baseball in the Dark,” a ripe recollection of a young boy’s dream that he could again hear radio broadcaster Mel Allen’s “summer voice going, going, on and on…telling me baseball in the dark.” That would be a downright good thing to do, and Romond knows a lot of those things.
You can check out Romond’s poetry books on his website, click here.
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2021 All rights reserved.
The poetic art of Grace Butcher
Poetry for reading out loud…
it’s that good
Book review: Child, House, World
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”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Feb 12, 2021 | American history, Book reviews, Books, Democracy, History, Power and inequality
…doing more good in America…
Book review:
American Character:
A History of the Epic Struggle
Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good
Colin Woodard (b1968)
Journalist
New York: Viking, 2016
308 pages
American Character is intuitive and informative analysis of what makes Americans tick, politically.
Woodard says we need to promote “fairness” in all its meanings if we want a shot at changing the success stories of Trump/laissez fair Republicans/Tea Party/the oligarchs. I reluctantly use the word “fairness” without any pretense of conveying the fullness of his meaning. It means a lot, in different ways—seriously, meaningfully, it’s different strokes for different folks.
I’m pretty sure that I’m gonna read American Character again.
It’s easy to understand what Woodard is saying. He offers a sane and credible strategy for doing more good in America for all Americans.
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2021 All rights reserved.
How does a poem end?
“Finis,” my final thoughts (my poem)
–
Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 74 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”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Feb 2, 2021 | Book reviews, Books
“ Philip, I love ‘ee ”
Book review:
The Snow Goose
by Paul Gallico (1897-1976)
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1960
58 pages
Paul Gallico (1897-1976)
Paul Gallico is an author I need to get to know better. The Snow Goose is my first attempt.
This justly famous short story is surprisingly simple in its construction and densely emotional in its impact. There are familiar plot elements: ugly old man meets beautiful young girl, and they develop a close relationship. In some ways one is moved to think of Silas Marner—there are both rich and rigid qualities in their love, never consummated, sharply constrained.
The snow goose imagery is pervasive. Gallico uses the obviously proper word pinion repeatedly and not always, perhaps, with the same definition in mind, but this is quibbling…despite Philip Rhayader’s intimate knowledge of the birds he paints, there is no compelling total image of the bird. What does a snow goose really look like?
The primitive eroticism of Rhayader’s relationship with the girl, Fritha, is bursting out of the story repeatedly before the final scenes. Think of the sensual heat of Girl With A Pearl Earring, deeply heartfelt and almost completely unexpressed. Vermeer painted the girl from life; Rhayader painted his girl from memory, a symbolic reflection of his restrained character and the repressed relationship.
The story line of Snow Goose is mostly mundane, but Gallico easily sustains a dramatic tension, although the Dunkirk evacuation scenes are almost a charade with the blunt Cockney accents dominating the dialog.
Snow Goose is eminently poetic—the ending that every reader can anticipate occurs with realistic sadness and realistic revelation. Fritha feels the words in her heart: “Philip, I love ‘ee.”
The long-patient reader is finally released to wordless exultation.
* * * *
I admit the abundant pleasures of re-reading The Snow Goose in February 2021. I happily engaged more fully with the character of the young girl Fritha, and the pathos of her isolation without parents in a hard community that took no notice of her friendship with the lonely artist. Fritha survives, and shares her memories and her private, splendid isolation with the beautiful bird.
———-
Among other treatments, this beautiful short story was transformed to film (television) in 1971 by the BBC and shown on the Hallmark Hall of Fame, with Richard Harris as Rhayader and Jenny Agutter as Fritha. See it in five installments on YouTube here.
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2021 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Chosen
Life: exuberant, and otherwise…
by Chaim Potok
–
My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 52 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”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Jan 19, 2021 | Human Nature, Theater and play reviews
a first-class bad guy…
Movie review:
The Wind and the Lion (1975)
Candice Bergen as Mrs. Eden Pedecaris.
Sean Connery as Mulay Achmed Mohammed el-Raisuli, Lord of the Rif and Sultan to the Berbers.
In real life he was Mulai Ahmed er Raisuni (Raisuli) (1871-1925), a Sherif and Lord of the Rif in Morocco, a tribal leader and brigand, “the last of the Barbary pirates.”
The Wind and the Lion is a dramatic interpretation of a real incident in Morocco in 1904. The real Raisuli kidnapped an American, Ion “Jon” Hanford Perdicaris (1840-1925) and his stepson, and held the two for ransom. President Teddy Roosevelt sent U. S. marines to rescue the men. Ultimately, the government of Morocco paid the ransom and the men were released.
The movie is wonderfully dashing, and the brutal details are romantically minimized. The captive American, Candice Bergen, doesn’t quite fall in love with Sean Connery, but it seems to be a close call.
Connery, with all of his moustaches and flowing robes, is a first class bad-guy hero, and he has a good heart. He’s happy to get his money, but he’s sorry to say goodbye to Mrs. Pedecaris.
In the final scene, the Raisuli and his lieutenant, the Sherif of Wazan, are silhouetted on a high beach against the setting sun, and the Sherif plaintively declares “Great Raisuli, we have lost everything. All is drifting on the wind as you said. We have lost everything.”
Raisuli revives the heart throbs: “Sherif, is there not one thing in your life that is worth losing everything for?”
* * * * * *
Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2021 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Proud Tower
…a lot more than a history book…
by Barbara Tuchman
–
many waters: more poems with 53 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”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Dec 29, 2020 | Book reviews, Books, History, World history
the “milliohnim” and “the promised land”
Book review:
Thieves in the Night:
Chronicle of an Experiment
by Arthur Koestler (1905-1983)
The Macmillan Company, New York, 1946
357 pages
Koestler, a Hungarian-British writer and journalist, more famously wrote Darkness at Noon, a critique of Communism and totalitarianism.
Thieves in the Night, written later, is a gently powerful story. Koestler recounts the travails and limited joys of only a few of the “milliohnim” who sought a promised land. His characters are Jews, creating new settlements on purchased Arab land in the Holy Land, prior to World War II.
Men and women who create settlements live a tough life. A reader like me learns almost too much about the vagaries and drudgery of deliberately, fully conscious communal life on Ezra’s Tower, an isolated hilltop in Galilee. First, establish the security perimeter, then erect the watchtower, build the children’s dorm, construct the cowshed, set up the showers…in that order. The dining hall, the sleeping huts for the men and women, and the lavatories are to be built later.
The Mukhtar and his clan in the nearby Arab village do not welcome the Hebrew newcomers. Soon, the leader of the village delegation gives morbid advice to the settlers: “You young fools and children of death, you don’t know what may happen to you.” Bauman responds curtly: “We are prepared.” The Jewish settlement at Ezra’s Tower is not a resort.
The story of the settlers’ life at Ezra’s Tower is mostly drab. Koestler’s exploration of their mindset, their politics, their philosophy, and their religion all swirled together is stunning. Their aspirations and their misgivings, and their palpable legacy of homelessness and their transforming experiences, are irresistible.
Thieves in the Night is an adventure for the open and inquiring mind. Occasional sympathetic despair is a perfectly understandable reaction.
After you read this novel, look around you and ask yourself: do you see things a bit differently? Do you like your new conception of “a thief in the night.”
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2020 All rights reserved.
–
Old Friends (book review)
Tracy Kidder tells so much truth about old age…
–
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”
* * * * * *
