Product Description

"Carver's poetry is like an almost invisible strand of fishing line reeling us all together, connecting us by the heart." --San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle

This prodigiously rich collection suggests that Raymond Carver was not only America's finest writer of short fiction, but also one of its most large-hearted and affecting poets. Like Carver's stories, the more than 300 poems in All of Us are marked by a keen attention to the physical world; an uncanny ability to compress vast feeling into discreet moments; a voice of conversational intimacy, and an unstinting sympathy.

This complete edition brings together all the poems of Carver's five previous books, from Fires to the posthumously published No Heroics, Please. It also contains bibliographical and textual notes on individual poems; a chronology of Carver's life and work; and a moving introduction by Carver's widow, the poet Tess Gallagher.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #52300 in Books
• Published on: 1996-04-04
• Released on: 2000-04-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780375703805
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
In the late '70s and early '80s, Raymond Carver's spare, moving fiction had an impact on American letters like nothing before or since. But Carver began life as a poet, and it might be argued that in their striking rhythms, their almost lyric compression, his stories resemble nothing so much as narrative verse. In All of Us, his collected poems, we find what his widow, Tess Gallagher, calls "the spiritual current out of which he moved to write the short stories." Played out against the quintessential Carver emotional landscapes of loneliness and alcohol and not enough money, these poems seem to contain the seeds of his stories within them, sometimes caught in a single image, line, or idea. Any Carver aficionado will experience shivers of recognition while reading this volume: how the final moments of "My Dad's Wallet" ("our breath coming and going") transmute into the "human noise we sat there making" in "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"; the way the early poem "Distress Sale" resonates in the garage sale of his "Why Don't We Dance."

"The poems give themselves as easily and unselfconsciously as breath," Gallagher writes in her introduction, and it's true. But just because they are plainspoken, don't mistake these for the doodles of a fiction writer whiling away the time between stories. Carver's poems have a lyric momentum all their own, never more evident than in his final poems, written months and in some cases just weeks before his death; Carver seems to have broken away from everything but the simplest and most direct forms of expression. This is language burnished to its essentials, heartbreaking in its very clarity. Witness the final words he ever wrote, in "Last Fragment":

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

That much, surely, he did. Carver lived a decade longer than he had any right to expect, lived to give us some of his most powerful work: two of his three books of stories, almost all of these poems. Nearly dead from alcoholism, he was granted a 10-year reprieve--"pure gravy," he calls that time, in one poem--and so were we. --Mary Park

From Publishers Weekly
Carver published three major poetry collections during the five years prior to his death in 1988 at age 50. Edited by Univ. of Hartford professor William Stull, and introduced by Carver's widow, the poet Tess Gallagher, this definitive gathering includes those books as published, the posthumous A New Path to the Waterfall, and numerous appendices of previously uncollected poems, notes and sources, and a brief biography. Like the short stories for which he is better known, Carver's poems piercingly observe characters incarcerated by time and circumstance, but whose dreary lives are occasionally ignited by moments of startling clarity. Reading straight through, one is struck by how many of Carver's poems hang on memory, on near forgotten incidents that flash through the poet's mind and produce his peculiarly weighty vignettes. Although Carver concentrated on the poor, bewildered and addicted?among whom he counted himself?readers will notice a marked turn toward the hopeful as they progress. Like the painter of "The Painter & the Fish," Carver, toward the end of his life, "was ready to begin/ again, but he didn't know if one/ canvas could hold it all. Never/ mind. He'd carry it over/ onto another canvas if he had to./ It was all or nothing." Carver put it all into his canvases, and All of Us does a fine job of presenting them for maximum impact.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Before his untimely death in 1988 at the age of 50, Carver had acquired an enviable reputation as one of America's finest short-story writers. Now, ten years later, Carver's widow Tess Gallagher and editor William L. Stull have collected nearly all of Carver's poetic work into one volume, complete with bibliographic notes and indexes. Carver's poems, with their gritty grace, express the continual astonishment of a man who had rescued himself from alcoholic near-death and penury to achieve acclaim and something like wisdom. His poetry is a kind of idiosyncratic documentary of his memories, reading, and experience: at times, he wrote too much and reserved too little, which could never have been said of his stories, with their stylized and painful silences. At his best, Carver offers profoundly moving meditations on his life, not unlike D.H. Lawrence's unconventional poems: "Don't worry your head about me, my darling./ We weave the thread given to us./ And Spring is with me." For all poetry collections.?Graham Christian, Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, MA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Customer Reviews

Transcendent Beauty
Carver is a true poet. He wrote about what he knew in a life both tragic and blessed. He was aware of the beauty in pain and the pain in beauty, and his poems evoke both for us with simple mastery. Here's a fragment from THE GIFT:

This morning there's snow everywhere. We remark on it.
You tell me you didn't sleep well. I say
I didn't either. You had a terrible night. "Me too."
We're extraordinarily calm and tender with each other
as if sensing the other's rickety state of mind.
As if we knew what the other was feeling. We don't,
of course. We never do. No matter.
It's the tenderness I care about. That's the gift
this morning that moves me and holds me.
Same as every morning.

Carver didn't use reality to create poems; he saw the poetry and captured it.....for us. That's his gift.

Minimal is a Good Thing
Those who have stated that Carver was a minimalist seem to feel minimalism is a negative. Minimalism is a form of expression, but it reflects merely the form, not the content. These are not minimal poems. The impact comes from straight language in simple grammatical structure. It is amazing how Carver is able to convey intense emotions with such a few number of words. He is a master. After I read FEAR, I was astounded (and somewhat disturbed) at how accurately he tells the depth of fear in such mundane events and short descriptions.

I am one of those who likes Carver's short stories as well as his poetry. He definitely has a masculine voice in all his work, but there is universality in the feelings. What I find more interesting than the "masculine" aspect of his writing (Hemingway was masculine too!) is his ability to write about city life and then go back to his roots in Oregon. Most writers have one of those locations in their souls. He has both and seems at home in both.

Well, I like Raymond Carver. Could you tell? This is writing that never sought out a thesaurus and still gives more shades of interpretation than Roget ever considered.

a book of poetry to carry with you
I've owned the hardcover edition of Carver's collected poems since it was released back in '99 or '00, and have kept it close to me ever since. This is the direct and honest language of his prose, condensed into a more personal, more poignant, and somehow more hopeful vision of life. Reading these poems forces you to be attentive -- to "make use" as he says -- and puts you back in touch with the things that remind you of a deeper reason to be here. And, it all happens quietly, without any effort, and without any pretense.