by Richard Subber | Nov 27, 2025 | Book reviews, Books, Language, Poetry, Reviews of other poets
roller coaster ride…
Book review:
Good Bones
by Maggie Smith
North Adams, MA: Tupelo Press, 2017
99 pages
Maggie Smith knows this: “You could make this place beautiful.”
She has beautiful words, beautiful phrases, even beautiful titles in her book of poems: Good Bones.
She doesn’t make best use or best order of her words and phrases. A reader is undeniably invited to consider “sky,” but the adventure begins with colossal sky and ends with a tunnel, and the sky becomes…a soft suit. This is more roller coaster than it is poem.
Good Bones is a slow-moving roller coaster that approximately takes you nowhere.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: Address Unknown
A friendship corrupted by Nazi hatred in WWII
by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor
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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”
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by Richard Subber | Nov 11, 2025 | Book reviews, Books, Joys of reading, Language, Poetry, Reflections, Reviews of other poets
you don’t have to put it down…
Book review:
A Thousand Mornings
by Mary Oliver (1935-2019)
New York, The Penguin Press, 2012
82 pages
If you know nothing about Mary Oliver, this book is as good as any to make your acquaintance.
The poems in A Thousand Mornings are recognizable Mary Oliver stuff:
“…which thought made me feel
for a little while
quite beautiful myself.” (“Poem of the one world”)
“I hardly move though really I’m traveling
a terrific distance.
Stillness. One of the doors
into the temple.” (“Today”)
This is a slim volume, a light collection.
You can read it in one sitting if you want to.
You just might want to.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Financier
Theodore Dreiser’s villain…
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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 | Nov 4, 2025 | Human Nature, Poetry, Reflections, Reviews of other poets, Tidbits
Write yourself a note…
. . . what of your rushed and useful life?
Imagine setting it all down—
papers, plans, appointments, everything—
leaving only a note:
“Gone to the fields to be lovely. . .”
by Lynn Ungar
Indeed.
Color me gone.
Give yourself permission to be lovely.
From “Camas Lilies” by Lynn Ungar in Blessing the Bread: Meditations. © Skinner House, 1995.
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Bartender’s Tale
Ivan Doig’s story, I mostly loved it…
–
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”
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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 | 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 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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