by Richard Subber | Nov 9, 2024 | Poetry, Reflections, Reviews of other poets
c’mon in…
“This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.”
Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī “Rumi” (1207-1273)
a 13th-century Persian poet
Coleman Barks, trans.
the guest house can be your house,
the “new arrival” can be you…
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: “The Gentle Boy”
The Puritans had a dark side…
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
–
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 | Jun 13, 2024 | Book reviews, Books, Language, Poetry, Reviews of other poets
dry tears, is all…
Book review:
All of Us: The Collected Poems
by Raymond Carver (1938-1988)
American poet, short story writer
386 pages
Repeat after me: à chacun son goût.
This is my first experience with Carver’s poetry.
I’ll say this right out: I do not disdain Carver’s poems, neither do I feel any urge to read them again.
He didn’t bother with the lyric voice. Don’t look for any sparks. Occasionally, one will feel moved to dry tears.
Carver offers a monochrome oeuvre. It’s prose in disguise. In some dusty corners Carver is included in the loosely defined group of poets who write so-called “dirty realism.” Think Bukowski (but Carver isn’t as strident as Bukowski, not nearly as imperious as Bukowski).
Carver’s poetic efforts are better than dirt, but what he writes really isn’t poetry in any flavor that appeals to me.
…à chacun son goût
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: Shakespeare’s Wife
Germaine Greer went overboard a bit…
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 | Jun 9, 2024 | Book reviews, Books, Joys of reading, Language, Poetry, Reviews of other poets
Milking cows and dad music…
Book review:
A Sense of Wonder:
The World’s Best Writers
on the Sacred, the Profane, & the Ordinary
Edited by Brian James Patrick Doyle (1956-2017)
Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2016
192 pages
If Brian Doyle thinks you’re a good writer, ‘nuff said.
Most likely you’ll recognize at least a few names among Doyle’s collection of “the world’s best writers.”
In A Sense of Wonder, you can go straight to Mary Oliver (“Do You Think There Is Anything Not Attached by Its Unbreakable Cord to Everything Else”), or Pico Iyer (“A Chapel Is Where You Can Hear Something Beating Below Your Heart: I Came to the Chapel at the University as the Light Was Failing…”), or Paul Hawken (“Healing or Stealing? The Best Commencement Address Ever”), or, of course, Doyle himself (“The Late Mister Bin Laden: A Note”).
I especially like Connor Doe’s “Perfect Time: A Note on the Music of Being a Dad,” and if you’re not a dad, and you read it, you’ll start wishing right away that you could be one.
My choice for best “feel good” selection is
“An Elevator in Utah: On How Children Make Despair Look Stupid.”
Reading it creates the strangest urge to learn how to milk cows.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: Shantung Compound
They didn’t care much
about each other…
by Langdon Gilkey
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 | May 4, 2024 | Book reviews, Books, Poetry, Reflections, Reviews of other poets
a bloomin’ wasteland, maybe…
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)
American-British writer, popularly acclaimed as a great poet of the 20th century
At long last, I’ve tried T. S. Eliot’s poetry.
Maybe I’ll put Collected Poems of T. S. Eliot back on the shelf, and try again after a while.
Maybe not.
“…We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men…”
From “The Hollow Men,” 1925, by T. S. Eliot
It’s not that I mind Eliot’s deliberate contradictions so much. I’m willing to be provoked. I’m open to being tantalized. I’m ready to be pushed or pulled outside my comfort zone.
The sticky point for me, with Eliot’s poetry, is that I never seem to get to the point, or maybe I simply don’t get the point. When I get to the end of one of his longish poems, I’m really not sure where I started, or where I wandered, or where I arrived.
I find little coherence in Eliot’s words and phrases and passages.
I think of myself as a wordsmith, and I love the beauty of elegant phrases and shimmering, specific, steely, selective, stately, splendid words that tell a delicious story or evoke a bloom of emotion.
For my taste, T. S. Eliot’s poetry isn’t tasty, and it’s a bloomin’ wasteland of jumbled words, fractured images, and unfinished imaginations.
If you’re wondering where all the flowers have gone, don’t look for answers in Eliot’s work.
Source: T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems of T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1958), 101.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Fire in the Lake (book review)
you should have read it in 1972…
by Frances FitzGerald
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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by Richard Subber | Jan 11, 2024 | Language, My poetry, Poetry, Reviews of other poets
the lust for words…
goût
Words can be a feast.
There is a lust for words
that dances round the page,
and waits for you,
for me,
it doesn’t hide,
it lingers for the last little word,
the glittering one
that leaps from the quill,
and fills the plate,
and waits for you,
for me,
to taste the shine…
August 26, 2023
My poem “goût” is inspired by “When My Friend Asks Me a Difficult Question” by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, August 25, 2023, as published on her website
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Proud Tower
…it’s a lot more than a history book…
by Barbara Tuchman
–
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 | Dec 28, 2023 | Language, Poetry, Reviews of other poets
Poetry alive!
As I write my kind of poetry, it happens often that a creative way is to imbue the inanimate things with human attributes, to hear the stones weeping, to believe that the owl called to me…
I find vivid elements in otherwise tolerable poems by other poets, including many whose names you and I know, and including others whose obscurity may not be fully deserved.
By chance I read “Hermes of the Ways” by Hilda “H. D.” Doolittle (1886-1961). In pre-WWI London, she joined Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington to form the original Imagist trio of poets. I am not visibly quivering to read more of her work but I offer here brief praise for her formulation, thus:
“…Apples on the small trees
Are hard,
Too small,
Too late ripened
By a desperate sun…”
Her casual introduction of an unsuccessful sun invites the reader to take a bite, nevertheless, and chew on the douleur of that big yellow thing in the sky…
“Hermes of the Ways” by Hilda Doolittle, published in Vol. 1, No. 5, of Des Imagistes, February 1914, as posted online on November 13, 2016, at Poets.org
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Home Team: Poems About Baseball (book review)
Edwin Romond hits another homer…
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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