by Richard Subber | Sep 28, 2025 | Book reviews, Books, Joys of reading, Language
and another read, another day…
Book review:
The Book Lovers’ Anthology:
A Compendium of Writing
about Books, Readers & Libraries
Oxford, UK: The Bodleian Library, 2014
344 pages
Are you dying to know what 201 authors who picked up a wide array of quills, pencils, and pens in the last 500 years had to say about books, readers, and libraries?
This anthology leaves out a few remarks, to be sure. I guess it’s fair to say there’s something for everyone.
You don’t have to be a book lover to soak up some of the joys that some of these authors tried to immortalize on paper.
You don’t have to be a book lover to imagine what else they might have said.
You can open The Book Lovers’ Anthology to a random page, and read for a while, and experience most of the good feeling that you’re going to get from opening to any random page.
You can leave a lot of it for another read, another day.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Fire in the Lake (book review)
you should have read it in 1972…
by Frances FitzGerald
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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 | Sep 25, 2025 | Reviews of other poets, Tidbits
cats are with us…
“…a sandy cat…”
Virginia Woolf said it…(quote)
no, no, not Anonymous…
“Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.”
Adeline Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
I am going to try to remember, whenever I indulge in pronouncing Truth, to look for the sandy cat in the background, and to take the cat into account.
Virginia Woolf also remarked on this devastatingly probable truth:
“For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.”
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
The “dime novels” in the Civil War
Think “blood-and-thunder”…
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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 | Sep 23, 2025 | My poetry, Poetry, Reflections
forget about berry picking…
Contemplation
What did the shuffling ape
think when she saw
for the first time
a whole tree,
as it stood alone
beyond the edge of the wood?
Did she think of shape for the first time?
Did she think “bigger than me”?
Did she conjure a new word?
Did she imagine not climbing it,
and shuffling on
to where the berries grow?
Did she point to it when her mate arrived?
Did she think “I move,
I am not that thing”?
June 18, 2025
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
The Collected Poems of Sara Teasdale…book review
Literate, but impersonal
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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”
Your comments are welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.
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by Richard Subber | Sep 18, 2025 | Human Nature, My poetry, Poetry, Reflections
I see futures…
More than coffee…
Polly has a name tag.
I don’t have a name tag.
She sees me as I am.
She doesn’t know what I see.
She sees now,
I see futures, more for her than for me.
When I slumped in this booth,
I thought I wanted coffee…
I think what I really want
is to be really ready
to be the old man who is already me.
What I want is to warm myself
with old joys in new ways,
what I want is the promise
of all my yesterdays,
the promise of kissing my beloved
at tomorrow’s dawn,
what I want is to be remembered
by my grandchildren.
What I want is to tell Polly, gently,
to see her futures with my eyes,
to pay attention to the memories
that are piling up,
to let herself rejoice in the tomorrows,
to start learning
what kind of old lady she’s going to be…
She stands there,
somehow looking down
on the mountain of my years,
with her order book in hand,
and she asks:
“Know what you want?”
May 31, 2020
Inspired by “No Problem” by George Bilgere (b1951)
My poem “More than coffee…” was published in my fifth collection of 53 poems, My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems.
You can buy it on Amazon (paperback and Kindle),
or get it free in Kindle Unlimited, search for “Richard Carl Subber”
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
The Wind and the Lion (1975)
heroic, the way it was…(movie review)
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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 | Sep 16, 2025 | Book reviews, Books, Reviews of other poets
maybe Mary knows a lot of stuff…
Book review:
Upstream: Selected Essays
by Mary Oliver
New York: Penguin Press, 2016
I’m allowed to say this: I like Mary Oliver’s poetry a whole lot more than I like her essays.
Upstream just seems like a long, lonely walk against the current, even if the stream is a lovely thing in a secret bosky place where being cheek-to-cheek with a turtle may not seem like a completely bad idea.
Oliver loves the narrative style, and she’s happy with much more attention to the details of Nature than I’m able to tolerate.
Her reflections about Hawthorne, and Poe, and Emerson, and Whitman may be spectacularly well informed, and they may be insightful, but I don’t know enough to judge and I do know enough to suspect that no one really knows in great detail what was going on in, for instance, Whitman’s mind when he was endlessly composing and publishing Leaves of Grass. Maybe Oliver somehow knows…good for her if she does. I suspect that she was writing what she wanted to believe.
I’ll stick to reading what I want to read.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Bridges of Madison County
If you’re looking for
highly stoked eroticism
and high-rolling lives
that throw off sparks when they touch,
look elsewhere.
by Robert Waller
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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 | Sep 14, 2025 | My poetry, Poetry, Tidbits
the crumbs beckon…
not just cookies…
Don’t reach for the last one,
not yet,
let the full taste linger,
let the crunch
become a munch,
let the crumbs beckon,
lick your fingers
one last time,
then go ahead.
Do it.
Eat the last macaroon.
Say “thank you!”
right out loud,
let everyone hear it!
May 25, 2025
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: An Empire on the Edge
by Nick Bunker
The British wanted to win
the Revolutionary War,
but they had good reasons
for not trying too hard…
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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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