by Richard Subber | May 30, 2023 | My poetry, Poetry
the trusting babe…
Near
…close enough to feel my thumb
in her searching grip,
close enough to share
her apple breath,
close enough to cradle
her weight across my arm,
and weep true love’s tears
as she suddenly sleeps
without a care…
August 27, 2021
I was walking around our kitchen, in early 2011, with my first granddaughter in my arms.
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: “The Gentle Boy”
Oh yes, the Puritans had a dark side…
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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 | May 16, 2023 | Language, My poetry, Poetry
The pushing, potent, heaving…
Poesy
This is, nearly, what it’s like.
Magma flowing cool, I think,
is nearly right,
the swelling flow,
quite nearly right.
The pushing, potent,
familiar overflowing burden,
is quite nearly truly right.
The heaving rush in one clean moment,
of one clean, bursting, raptured ideal,
it speaks the straining gush of simple words
that stream around and through,
cool fire sparking
as they merge and touch
and match and lodge together.
This is nearly, quite truly,
nearly certain,
quite nearly right.
April 3, 1996
Sanibel Island, Florida
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
How does a poem end?
“Finis,” my thoughts (my poem)
–
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 | Apr 11, 2023 | Book reviews, Books, Reviews of other poets
Were you thinking “Goose grease”?
Book review:
American Poetry Observed: Poets on Their Work
Joe David Bellamy, ed.
Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988
313 pages
The idea of this book is great. It would be marvelous to listen to these 26 poets talking about their work, and talking about making poems.
Bellamy has collected interviews with 26 poets, including a couple of my favorites: May Sarton and Galway Kinnell.
It’s no fault of the editor that American Poetry Observed is a lot of ponderous and hard-to-digest rumination about the meanings of poetry, the roles of influential poets, and what was on the minds of the interviewees when they were writing their poems. I don’t blame the poets too much, because they were responding to the interviewers’ questions.
The interviewers, sadly enough, were numbingly predictable, and, too often, self-importantly well-informed about the content of the interviewees’ work.
It just doesn’t seem valuable to me to read what a poet has to say when she’s asked something like “Did you have Eliot’s conception of J. Alfred Prufrock in mind when you wrote ‘Goose grease’ in 1942?”
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: Lord of the Flies
Never more relevant…
by William Golding
–
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 | Apr 4, 2023 | Book reviews, Books, Joys of reading, Language
enticements to lingering reverie…
Book review:
Twice-Told Tales
by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd.
First published in 1837 (first series) and 1842 (second series)
This edition first printed 1911, reprinted 1964.
357 pages.
We preserve the remnants of our youth in chambers of the brain that often are, for good or ill, inaccessible to our conscious minds.
The baubles of memory in Twice-Told Tales are potent sparks that guide us to the once-remembered moments, the enticements to lingering reverie that fills new moments with newly imagined memories that rescue us from once-remembered despair, and fill the blank spaces with second chances.
Hawthorne collected such moments of youth, such bauble treasure, in “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” in the fertile and fervid desperations of four venerable friends who eagerly swallow an elixir that boosts them to a capering re-enactment of their youth—but oh, so brief, so immaterial, so ephemeral that the long glass in the room can only reflect their withered miens, and none of the hot young beauty that they see again, for precious moments, in the emboldened gazes that they share.
Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales include “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” and 38 other short stories (originally published in 1837 and 1842) showing off his evocative prose, and embracing a wide range of human emotions.
You’ll be able to find something you like.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review:
The American Revolution: A History
The “Founders” actually were afraid
of “democracy”…
by Gordon S. Wood
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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 | Mar 25, 2023 | Language, My poetry, Poetry
a kind of music of the spheres…
Overture
I stood awhile in prescient dark,
faint sounds of night
were near and far,
a rustling song,
a sylvan chord,
a tiny thrum,
and more—
a downbeat for the dawn to come,
scant chorus rising,
I whispered hallowed words
to make a coda,
and waited for the star of day.
January 21, 2023
Inspired by “Behind Stowe” (1927) by Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
A poem about the right thing
…and the lesser incarnation…
“Vanity”
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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 | Feb 19, 2023 | Human Nature, My poetry, Poetry
giving is all…
Santa’s helpers
Bows and ribbons all around,
we’re on the floor
wrapping in the dark hours,
and we unwrap our hearts
and share great gifts,
again and again.
December 25, 2022
Delightfully inspired by “Every Christmas Eve” by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, December 25, 2022, on her website, www.ahundredfallingveils.com
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: “Bartleby, the Scrivener”
Think about loneliness beyond understanding…
by Herman Melville
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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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