Product Description

Raymond Carver finished A New Path To The Waterfall shortly before his death in August 1988. These fifty poems--as hard and clear and emotionally pure as his short stories--chart a human journey: false starts and redemptions, the discovery of happiness, memory, and leave-taking, and the full apprehension of mortality. An avowal of love, this collection is also a haunting record of Carver's approach to death.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #378501 in Books
• Published on: 1994-01-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Carver, who died in 1988, wrote these poems during his last g months. "Many of them are luminous flashes, poised and tender meditations, while others read like cathartic, unresolved statements by a man struggling to come to terms with his life in the little remaining time allotted to him," found PW.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Though Carver is generally acknowledged to be a master of the short story, his first published work was poetry, and this collection, his last work, was completed shortly before his untimely death. His poetry is as recognizably his own as his stories and like them evokes depths of meaning beneath a surface simplicity. In her moving introduction, Carver's widow, writer Tess Gallagher, notes how often a particular poem calls to mind a corresponding story, and the reverse is also true. Indeed, to know Carver by his prose is to know him only partially. Master at illuminating those often mundane moments that starkly dramatize entire lives, Carver was also master at creating mood, and many of these poems have a striking lyrical intensity, especially when Carver unflinchingly faces death while celebrating life. A coda to a remarkable literary career.
- Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
After-glow
Another Mystery
Artaud
The Attic
Caution
Cherish
Conspirators
For The Record
Gravy
His Bathrobe Pockets Stuffed With Notes
Hummingbird (for Tess)
In A Greek Orthodox Church Near Daphne
The Kitchen
Late Fragment
Lemonade
Letter
Looking For Work (2)
The March Into Russia
Margo
The Moon, The Train
Mriacle
My Wife
The Net
No Need
The Offending Eel
On An Old Photograph Of My Son
One More
Out
The Painter & The Fish
Poems
Proposal
Quiet Nights
The Sturgeon
Summer Fog
Sunday Night
Suspenders
Thermopylae
This Word Love
Threat
Through The Boughs
The Toes
Transformation
Two Worlds
Wake Up
What The Doctor Said
Wine
Woman Bathing
The World Book Salesman
The Young Girls
Return To Krakow In 1880
Wet Picture
The Name
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Customer Reviews

A passionate and insightful collection
I've read this book a number of times now and it never fails to move me deeply. The 14 page introduction by Tess Gallagher, a touching account Carver's final months and their efforts to compile this collection in the face of his impending death, brings the poems to life and gives them an added urgency and passionate clear sightedness. At times ironic, at times a sardonic observor of life's foibles, and at times utterly transparent and vulnerable, Carver is never less than a great crafter of poetic visions.

The Style is the Man
Raymond Carver, whom I had the fortuitous pleasure of having lunch with, along with his girfriend Tess Gallagher, a couple of years before he died, was a true artist. Emily Dickinson puts poets above the sun and God in pantheon of what's most important, and people like Raymond Carver prove her right. Although this last offering by the 20th century's greatest minimalist writer is neither his greatest nor his most minimal, it strikes the same generous chord of longing, of heart warming simplicity and heart breaking honesty, that Carver strikes elsewhere. The style is the man, wrote Buffon (in French), and sure enough that is the case here: a style of simple emotional honesty, combined with an artist's experimental will to playfulness, sufffused with a hope whose transcendent beauty is precisely its distillation from the undoctored elements of ordinary reality. This book, enhanced and completed by Tess Gallagher's wonderfully loving but unsentimental introduction, shows Carver at the end of his life; still excited about art, and the possibility of the poem form, he splices lines from Chekov stories, giving them titles and thereby
transforming them into poem epigraphs to his own measured prose. The transformation of the Chekov short story to the Carver poem perhaps underscores the poetic process itself, whittling down reality into its artistic essence--the process so aptly demonstrated by Carver, who never wrote a novel, in his short stories. As Salmon Rushdie says on the cover (I paraphrase), read this book by Carver. Read everything by Carver. Raymond Carver was a great writer.

real poetry
this is real poetry. raymond carver is a reflective and insightful poet. there is no denying his powerful way with words. there is a warmth and closeness to his tales that seem painfully close to real life, to our lives. there are also verses by Chekov who is just incredible. i can not describe the visions speaking in this book. But they move and surge and plunge into your heart and speak clearly.