All of Us: The Collected Poems [Hardcover]

Raymond Carver (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 14, 1998

"I began as a poet, my first publication was a poem. So I suppose on my tombstone I'd be very pleased if they put 'Poet and short-story writer--and occasional essayist' in that order."

Now, in what would have been his sixtieth year, and ten years after his death, Raymond Carver's poems--more than three hundred in all--are collected in this volume, allowing readers to experience their full range and overwhelming cumulative power. This complete edition brings together, in their order of publication, the early poems of Fires, the mature work of Where Water Comes Together with Other Water and Ultramarine, and the last, intensely moving collection, A New Path to the Waterfall. Poems uncollected during his lifetime, but published posthumously in No Heroics, Please, are included in an appendix.

The text has been edited by Professor William L. Stull of the University of Hartford, whose notes address details of first publication and significant variant readings. The introduction by Tess Gallagher, Mr. Carver's widow, provides valuable insights into his methods of composition.

Hailed as our own Chekhov, and certainly the preeminent storyteller of his time, Raymond Carver is revealed in All of Us as the "heir to that most appealing American poetic voice, the lyricism of Theodore Rothke and James Wright" (New York Times). And whether in fiction or verse, his heart, craft, and vision ensure his essential position in modern literature.

Editorial Reviews

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (September 14, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375403981
• ISBN-13: 978-0375403989
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.7 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,469,572 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938. His father was a saw-mill worker and his mother was a waitress and clerk. He married early and for years writing had to come second to earning a living for his young family. Despite, small-press publication, it was not until Will You Please Be Quiet Please? appeared in 1976 that his work began to reach a wider audience. This was the year in which he gave up alcohol, which had contributed to the collapse of his marriage. In 1977 he met the writer Tess Gallagher, with whom he shared the last eleven years of his life. During this prolific period he wrote three collections of stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Cathedral and Elephant. Fires, a collection of essays, poems and stories, appeared in 1985, followed by three further collections of poetry. In 1988 he completed the poetry collection A New Path to the Waterfall.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Transcendent Beauty, August 28, 2004

By 

Gordon Quinlan - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: All of Us: The Collected Poems (Paperback)

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.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a book of poetry to carry with you, December 8, 2005

By 

Steven Veenema - See all my reviews
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This review is from: All of Us: The Collected Poems (Paperback)

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.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Minimal is a Good Thing, April 22, 2004

By 

Nicole Harpe "NicH" - See all my reviews

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This review is from: All of Us: The Collected Poems (Paperback)

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.