Customer Reviews

Ultramarine

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Ultramarine by Raymond Carver, a collection of his poetry, is a gem. With each of my moves I find myself discarding all of my books except for this one. This is the one I hold and keep returning to.

While Carver is better known for his short stories, I think it's his poems that communicates his silent emotions. The sparse language of Raymond Carver that is so effective in his short stories is even more powerful in his poetry.

If there is anything I would ever recommend, this is it.

He tells what he sees
and what he experiences
it can be Bonnard's life story
in paintings of his wife
it can be his own effort to see the sea and the sky
and not let his mind intervene
he tells and usually what he tells
is a story
and the stories are interesting stories ironic stories
of his own life
and his need to change it
to plunge into clear water
as his father did
or to write with a sharp clear pen
like Kafka
after eight hours too many looking at his watch in the office
he writes these poems and tells these stories
and we reading them become more alive to the life in us
how strange and more real.

A wonderful book. Carver's poems (not just this book) are crystal, common, intense, and familiar. They possess all the clear reality of his short stories. The problem with his poems isn't his poems; it's the people who come to them by way of his short stories and, as scandalous as this may seem, do not like poetry. But if you do: oh my!

I'm very surprized that no one has reviewed this book! I thought that it was fabulous! I love the way that the plot was on the sea, and its mysteries! I was totally caught up in the book! I read this book straight through, whithout talking to anyone. I hope that there are more books like this out there, and I hope that you will be the next to buy, read, and review this book!

I often find myself defending Carver as a writer's writer, someone whose craft and voice are just as important as the story itself. He uses the language of the people he writes about to tell their story, and his though he's been labeled a minimalist, his work is more of that of a precisionist. Carver wastes no words, and his portions are perfect. I'd place Carver in the top three short story writers of all time, of anyone's list.

His poetry sucks, though. Where his stories are able to carry sparse poetic moments (the drawing at the end of "Cathedral" or the barber moving his hands through the man's hair in "The Calm," to name two) through the strength of the narrative, his poems have almost no narrative to speak of. A poem like "Limits" is almost successful because Carver spreads it out a bit and lets some sort of form emerge, but even then he relies too heavily on the abstract. He's always used the abstract well, and it's disappointing to see him fail so miserably at mastering that same trait in his poetry. The vast majority of these poems are like the last line of the story "Fat" ("Waiting for what? I'd like to know. My life is going to change. I feel it."), where we are allowed to have the whimsy because we've been set-up for it. His poems begin and end with arbitrary people doing arbitrary things, and they eat their slice of life without sharing.

His poems are exactly like his stories: from-the-gut tales of yore as told by an almost-dead Grandfather, the only man who can tell the same story as everyone else, but make it matter. Here's the difference: same Grandpa, same stories, except he's senile now and can only get out bits and pieces. Everything's disjointed and you can only shrug, because even though the story and the people in it probably matter, he's just not convincing enough. That's Carver's poetry.