by Richard Subber | Oct 7, 2025 | Language, Reviews of other poets, Tidbits
you can make sunshine…
“…make sunshine in a shady place.”
from The Sketches of Louisa May Alcott
by Louisa May Alcott
New York: Ironweed Press, Inc., 2001
p. 250
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Movie review: A Doll’s House
Henrik Ibsen’s classic on abuse…
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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”
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by Richard Subber | Oct 4, 2025 | Book reviews, Books, Language
no dreariness here…
Book review:
The Jungle Book, Vol. 1
by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
New York: Grosset & Dunlap, Publishers, 1893, 1978
279 pages
“ ‘There is none like to me!’ says the Cub in the
pride of his earliest kill;
But the jungle is large and the Cub he is small.
Let him think and be still.”
Maxims of Baloo, from “Kaa’s Hunting” in The Jungle Book
Kipling created continuing dramatic tension in the framework of rectitude in The Jungle Book, Vol. 1.
Two of my favorite stories are “Kaa’s Hunting” and “Toomai of the Elephants.” The characters are well wrought, they live the stories, the drama is personal.
Welcome the joy of storytelling—casual, formal, the stories offered new to those who like stories, offered again to those who like stories.
In Kipling there is no dreariness. There is excitement, danger, leaf-eating, aspiration, brotherhood, and triumph.
If you read it twice, you get more.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
“Fishering,” by Brian Doyle
…what meets the eye…
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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”
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by Richard Subber | Sep 30, 2025 | My poetry, Poetry, Reflections
first thoughts…
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.
Book review: An Empire Divided
King George and his ministers
wanted the Caribbean sugar islands
more than they wanted the 13 colonies…
by Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy
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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 | 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 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)
–
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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