Portrait of Robert Riche by his daughter Michele Riche.
A memoir in verse, a life summed up in lines of poetry: All the Days is Ridgefielder Robert Riche’s latest publication, bringing together images from his youth to his later years as he takes stock.
Mr. Riche, who has published several previous books of poetry as well as novels and plays, takes his reader through a life that spanned a good chunk of the last century, from memories of the McCarthyism of the 50s and a farewell to the Weavers to his attempts at unionizing his fellow workers before the business owners pulled out and moved the company south for cheaper labor. He recalls Allen Ginsberg and Howl, but —
I’m ashamed.
I have a flat-screen television. You don’t know
what that is. I don’t, either, except it costs more.
The newscasters all say the same things.
I write them indignant letters.
They ignore me. It’s the best I can do, Allen.
Fifty years later.
Summing up life in The Gift, Riche concludes:
It was, after all, a gift.
I could not help
but be grateful for, even with
its ordinariness.
For those who’ve recently seen the movie Trumbo, and heard the name Robert Rich (one of the noms de plume used by Dalton Trumbo during the McCarthy-era Blacklist; winner of an Academy Award for The Brave One), Bob Riche says there’s no connection, except for this: When Robert Rich was awarded his Oscar in absentia in 1956, Bob Riche’s mother got phone calls asking if that was her son. Her son, as it happened, was in Paris at the time, unaware of that brush with fame.
The book, All the Days: A Memoir in Poetry, may be ordered at local bookstores and is available online at Amazon.com. —S.S.S.
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