Tubbables by John Roche

In the Blueblack

                                    After Robert Hayden

Wake to sound of snowplow

dopplering down the street

notice scraping of shovel—

Dad out in the blueblack cold—

Aromas send you and your brother hurtling down the stairs

to the kitchen where Mom is making breakfast

Radio’s alphabetically announcing school closings—

first big snow of the year—

Listen impatiently as a thousand small towns report in

—delayed or closed—

But the tea kettle's hiss drowns out the S’s

so you’ll have to listen all over again

I Stole an Eclipse

I stole an eclipse today

Rode a snapping turtle

all the way to San Luis Obispo

Climbed an agave stalk taller than an oak

higher than the campanile

Held up the sun with my BB gun

Put it in my back pocket

Ate a tangerine

Kicked a soccer ball to the moon

Listened to the Music of the Spheres

Watched as it ricocheted through the galaxy

Rode vampire fish sailing celestial seas

Hummed L’Éclair de Lune

and composed a sonnet

What others are saying about Tubbables

An abracadabra of argle-bargles. A dictionary of deamflums. A guide book of gallilmaufries. A trilogy of taradiddles. What it definitely isn’t is an unreadable hurkle-durkle of caterwauling crinkum-crankums. Roche’s poems do and say what poetry has mostly forgotten and decided not to do and say in the recent past. They speak to us from viewpoints we can and will all enjoy, remember and revisit. Poems from and for all ages from thens to nows to always. To parapraise the closing words of this unbafflegabbing book of brawnesses, you’ll definitely want to pour another few cups of poetic joe.

— Stuart A. Paterson, Recent BBC Scotland Poet-in-Residence

TUBBABLES, by JOHN ROCHE

Words are friends

and from their distance

will return.

- Robert Duncan, from Roots and Branches

I'm up to my ears in John Roche's new book Tubbables, which will come out in April, 2024, from Poetry Playhouse Publications. The crazy words and expressions in the first third are thoroughly entertaining. The poet surprises with a bridge to the very words you use or words you forgot or words you've rarely heard of like "hurkle-durkle" or "Askookum."He provides etymology followed by his own interesting "trivialities" or spinoffs. After that entertaining section, the book transcends into biographical poems, truly American story poems, family revelations with ancestral references even back to the old country. The poems reveal that very common American orientation of childhood and younger years expressed through the exquisite ear of an original poet.

In "Sandwich Wrappings," the third section of Tubbables, there's a whole new kettle of fish with a Joycean flair for language and an approach towards science, Americana, politics and our social world. The poems send you to the dictionary with some of the references, with witty revelations of current reality always informed by le mot juste from this poet's incisive perspective. There are references to social media and light word play, an amazing balance of the light and the profound. Poems can be meaningfully obscure and yet expressed in commonly ordinary words. The run of the poet's mind expands what any reader might expect and presents a poetry reality which is of the utmost maturity, as well as refreshing in the lighter poems.

I have seldom enjoyed a book of poetry as much as I have John Roche's Tubbables. Poetry informs. John Roche's Tubbables informs, delights and surprises. Poetry books pop up hourly across the US but few can offer, as in this book, the verbal wit, the revealing biographical reality transformed through a rare poet's ear and internal linguistic revelations.

Tubbables by John Roche offers roots to old expressions, roots of the poet's family upbringing, and it exposes didactically the roots of our current world human malaise. The range of inspired expression in this book is amazing. All is based on the eye and the ear, the wit and the depth of a first-class poet. Tubbables is a must for any reader of American poetry today.

                                                       —Larry Goodell, publisher of Duende Press and author of Making It: Poems from 1968.

Here is an original tour de force combining astute humor and a bit of badinage which does not betray a deeper level of meaning. The whimsical cover prepares you for quite the laundry list of our 21st century that will be hung up in the poems enclosed. All three sections combine John Roche's sensitive eye with love of language play to provide the reader with refreshing clin d'oeils, whether it be his Irish ancestors, his knowledge of poets and the art and craft they practice, or a welcome commentary on our contemporary times.

You will learn new words in the double DD of "Dictionary Doggerel," but with a bonus of belly laughs and spankingly original takes on life both present and past. This is a book which will expose you to Swedish, to old Greek words, and "ping pong" of virtual representation and "fractically practical" transformed to ekphrastically playful. You will want to read it again to capture the full cleverness and references. You will learn stories, see words like "cups" and "fruitcake" fill with an abundance of layered meaning. A must-read to lift your spirits, but also to think about how to think of the times we're in.

—Kitty Jospé, author of Whispers of Perhaps