Product Description

A vast collection of poems which won "Poetry" magazine's Levinson prize."Somehow the nuances of daily experience, the warmth, humor, and reflection the poet brings to subjects are quite unlike anyone else's." - J.Parisi

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2201866 in Books
• Published on: 1985-03-12
• Released on: 1985-03-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 130 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Best-known for his wonderful short stories (What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, etc.), Carver works the same narrative magic in these poems. In everyday language he offers memories of his family and past loves, uses fishing and hunting events to portray his innermost thoughts about life and death. PW called these poems "accessible and lovely."
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
Afghanistan
After Rainy Days
All Her Life
Anathema
The Ashtray
Ask Him
Aspens
At Least
Away
Blood
The Catch
The Caucasus; A Romance
Commerce
The Cranes
Eagles
Elk Camp
Energy
The Eve Of Battle
Extirpation
Fear
The Fishing Pole Of The Drowned Man
For Tess
A Forge, And A Scythe
The Grant
Grief
A Haircut
Happiness
Happiness In Cornwall
Harley's Swans
The Hat
Hominy And Rain
In A Marine Light Near Sequim, Washington
In Switzerland
In The Year 2020
Interview
The Juggler At Heaven's Gate
Late Afternoon, April 8, 1984
Late Night With Fog And Horses
Listening
Locking Yourself Out, Then Trying To Get Back In
Medicine
Memory [i]
Money
Movement
Music
My Boat
My Crow
My Dad's Wallet
My Daughter And Apple Pie
My Death
My Work
Next Door
Next Year
The Old Days
Our First House In Sacramento
The Party
The Pipe
Plus
The Poem I Didn't Write
A Poem Not Against Songbirds
Radio Waves
Rain
Reading
Reading Something In The Restaurant
The Road
Romanticism
A Squall
Still Looking Out For Number One
To Begin With
To My Daughter
Tomorrow
The Trestle
Venice
A Walk
Wenas Ridge
Where Water Comes Together With Other Water
The Windows Of The Summer Vacation Houses
Woolworth's, 1954
Work
Yesterday, Snow
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Review
"Over the years, Raymond Carver has been writing poetry alongside his fiction -- same of his earlier verse appeared in a recent anthology titled Fires -- and the most vigorous poems in this new collection function as distilled, heightened versions of his stories, offering us fugitive glimpses of ordinary lives on the edge." -- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Carver's voice is direct, his themes universal."

-- The Seattle Past-Intelligencer

"The emotional impact of his scenes and slices of life is imparted without strain; the voice speaks: with such an uncanny directness and ease -- and remarkable intimacy -- that the reader may wander at poem's end how such simplicity can carry such power...Somehow the nuances of daily experience, the warmth, humor, and reflection the poet brings to his subject are quite unlike anyone else's, bath in his immediacy and in the ability to make us identify and be moved. A splendid book."

-- Joseph Parisi, Booklist

"The stories poems tell are so wonderfully self-contained, so self-evident, so gracefully metaphorical." -- The Village Voice

"There is a severity of language, an understatement of emotion, that endows the poem of his first major collection with the feel of extraordinary experience. To read them is to have the sense this man has l lived more than most of us. We trust him because of the plainly conversational diction and the lapel-grabbing rhythms....They are very moving, very memorable."

-- Dave Smith, Poetry

Customer Reviews

Shame, loss, and trying again . . .
Carver can break your heart without seeming to try, and there is that quality in many of these poems. Written in the mid 1980s, in the last years before his death, they are that mix of bittersweet memory, melancholy, and joy taken in the here and now. Living with poet Tess Gallagher in a house overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca in Washington (Carver grew up in Yakima, Washington), he writes of the days that pass there, the frequent rains and the boats passing on the water, and he tracks the course of fleeting emotions, often triggered by long-forgotten memories.

He has this ability to discover the extraordinary in the absolute ordinary, and he can bring together ideas with images drawn from everyday life that disturb and shock the heart, as when he recalls an old relationship while describing the drops and smears of blood left in a kitchen sink after gutting fish. As with his stories, these poems are written in plain, conversational language while evoking at the same time the darkly inexpressible. Simple and direct on the surface, they are like being in a small boat on deep waters.

Moving, Flowing
This is fine poetry to start Raymond Carver with. "The Ashtray" demonstrates an excellent portrayal of a selfish man and his girlfriend. "My Daughter's Apple Pie" is probably one of Carver's best works as far as showing his understatement style especially with a serious subject (which, actually, is very common with Carver). The book contains everything: nature, death, love, father/son relationships, water, everything. Carver's death is only a loss if you do not read his work.

The real stuff
These poems have the beauty of life in them. They have real pain and an honest confrontation with whatever it is Carver meets, and tries to contend with. The honesty comes with the brokenness of the life .And there is a sense that the man is telling you what he feels and what he knows and what he has learned from life. And its not an easy life. It has martial discord, and distance between loved ones, and a lot of drinking, and mixed- up relationships. But what I think redeems it and makes the poetry of Carver so appealing is that it too talks genuinely of what is good and meaningful in the life. It can be a phone - call from a brother which connects them remotely again and reminds them of the world they had once together now largely gone. It can be a meditation on a writer ( Machado) which evokes a sense of how Literature can deepen our perception into the world, it can be a lament in understanding a former wife's feelings.
It is simple language and understandable. It tells a story. It has a lot of the disorder of life in it, and the kind of scandalous things most of us would rather do without . It has embarassment and shame and failure and poverty and regret and sorrow and love- much much love. As in the poem in which he takes the time to himself given by his beloved's absence but refuses to do one thing sleep in their common bed without her. It has a rough integrity of a real human being and poet.
This is the real stuff. Enjoy it.