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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by Richard Subber | Nov 23, 2023 | Book reviews, Books, Poetry, Reviews of other poets
her words are arrows…
Book review:
Evidence
by Mary Oliver (1935-2019)
Boston: Beacon Press, 2009
74 pages
Guilty, guilty, guilty. With Evidence, Mary Oliver is guilty once again of nailing me to the floor so I can read every single poem in her book, one after the other.
Her style encourages me to think that I can write more and better poetry, because she makes it seem so easy to choose the right words, in the right order. Mary speaks straight from her heart, she uses exacting words as arrows to find precise targets in vision and imagination, and she leaves out all the other stuff.
Despite the mountain of her years, we have Evidence: Mary Oliver climbed to the highest branches. Here’s an excerpt from “About Angels and About Trees”:
“…what I know is that
they rest, sometimes,
in the tops of the trees
and you can see them,
or almost see them,
or, anyway, think: what a
wonderful idea…
The trees, anyway, are
miraculous, full of
angels…and certainly
ready to be
the resting place of
strange, winged creatures
that we, in this world, have loved.”
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
“Boil up” and other good manners…
The “Hobo Ethical Code” is worth a quick read.
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 | Jun 20, 2023 | My poetry, Poetry, Reviews of other poets, Tidbits
he stares at me, no fear…
Busy
The chippie halts on the second step.
I’ve seen him there, he will not stay,
his hole is close, he will not stray,
he skips across my little yard
but not too far.
I want to ask him, just this once,
if he’d like to scout a cozy place
he’s never seen,
he stares at me, no fear,
I’d like a little chat, I think,
I’d like to hear his thoughts,
but I can see
he has no time to talk.
October 23, 2019
Inspired by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s “Following Mr. Berry’s Instructions,”
published October 23, 2019, on her website, A Hundred Falling Veils
“You have to be able to imagine lives that aren’t yours.”
Wendell Berry
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
84, Charing Cross Road (book review)
Helene Hanff, on reading good books…
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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 | 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
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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 | Nov 30, 2022 | Book reviews, Books, Language, Poetry, Reviews of other poets
good story telling…
Book review:
The Complete Poems of Sarah Orne Jewett
by Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909)
New York: Ironweed Press, 1999
85 pages
It is a solid, pleasant experience to read the poems of Sarah Orne Jewett.
Mostly her imagery in The Complete Poems is not exalted, and mostly her insights are not life-changing, but she is a compelling story teller and she invites the reader to see what she sees.
That’s good.
Some excerpts:
“And so, across the empty miles
Light from my star shines. Is it, dear,
Your love has never gone away?
I said farewell and—kept you here”
From “Together”
———————————————-
“The nearest daisies looked at me
Because they heard me call;
And they told each other what I had said,
Though they did not hear it all.
And I stood there wishing for you,
All alone on the hill;
While far below were the fields asleep,
And above, the sky so still.”
From “A Night in June”
———————————————-
“I saw the worn rope idle hang
Beside me in the belfry brown.
I gave the bell a solemn toll—
I rang the knell for Gosport town.”
From “On Star Island”
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
A glimpse of the millennial dawn…
witness to the song of the sea…
a nature poem
“Chanson de mer”
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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”
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by Richard Subber | Mar 30, 2021 | Book reviews, Books, Joys of reading, Language, Poetry, Reviews of other poets
even baseball in the dark…
Home Team: Poems About Baseball
by Edwin Romond
West Hartford, CT: Grayson Books, 2018
You really don’t have to be a baseball fan to feel the joy that just won’t quit in Romond’s offering of romantic poems about baseball.
I mean romantic in the sense of the 19th century Romantic Era, when practitioners in most of the arts were focused on the many dimensions of intense emotion and esthetic experience.
You will discover that Romond’s poetry has so much of longing, and recognition, and acceptance, and the joys we can find in everyday life, and Home Team has many versions of all that.
My favorite is “Baseball in the Dark,” a ripe recollection of a young boy’s dream that he could again hear radio broadcaster Mel Allen’s “summer voice going, going, on and on…telling me baseball in the dark.” That would be a downright good thing to do, and Romond knows a lot of those things.
You can check out Romond’s poetry books on his website, click here.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2021 All rights reserved.
The poetic art of Grace Butcher
Poetry for reading out loud…
it’s that good
Book review: Child, House, World
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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