My Uncle’s Favorite Coffee Shop

“My Uncle’s Favorite Coffee Shop” maintains a casual, intimate tone across its six stanzas. Composed of rangy lines of uneven length, often end-stopped to create a slow pace, the poem begins with an intimate, detailed description of the coffee shop experience the uncle cherishes. Nye describes the “serum of steam rising from the cup,” (Line 1), creating a medicinal, hypnotic, and comforting sense with the word “serum” and the consonance of “s” sounds across the line. “What comfort to be known personally by Barbara,” the speaker says, “her perfect pouring hand and starched ascot” (Lines 2-3). Here, the speaker hints at the distance between the uncle and the server, which is a theme more deeply explored later in the poem. Even though Barbara knows her patron “as the two easy eggs and the single pancake, / without saying” (Lines 4-5), she doesn’t know much else. As the reader learns more about the uncle as the poem progresses, it becomes clear that Barbara, with her very American name, is perhaps kind and good at her job by providing a comforting atmosphere for the uncle but is not a true intimate.