false<![CDATA[All of Us: The Collected Poems]]>http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166476706m/11439.jpg114394In 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 <I>All of Us</I>, 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." <p> "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": <blockquote> And did you get what<br> you wanted from this life, even so?<br> I did.<br> And what did you want?<br> To call myself beloved, to feel myself<br> beloved on the earth.<br> </blockquote> 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. <I>--Mary Park</I>138941996All of Us: The Collected Poemstotal:339|5:143|4:128|3:54|2:12|1:2|33914154513121falsefalseTue Jun 24 12:20:06 -0700 2008Mon Jul 14 12:24:44 -0700 2008 I don't like reading too many short stories by the same...more...]]>
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You Don't Know What Love Is (an evening with Charles Bukowski)
The Mailman as Cancer Patient
The Ashtray
Still Looking Out for Number One
Next Year
Energy
Locking Yourself Out, Then Trying to Get Back In
My Boat
Plus
Reading Something i...more...]]>
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Fires and Where Water Comes Together with Other Water. By the time you get to Ultramarine, and then especially in A New Path to the Waterfall, Carver has abandoned the fishing streams and t...more...]]>
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There is a poem about looking at an amputated leg on the surgery table that is vivid. Carver had a job as a janitor at that surgery suite so he wrote a poem about it.
There is another poem that mentions M.F.K Fisher which lead me ...more...]]>
40falsefalseThu Jul 03 19:17:48 -0700 2008Thu Jul 03 19:21:07 -0700 2008 Carver is a master of the line break that same way that Bukowski was. Sometimes, the words may seem mundane, but it's the line brea...more...]]>
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30falsefalseThu Oct 21 00:00:00 -0700 1999Thu Feb 14 22:06:09 -0800 2008Thu Feb 14 22:06:09 -0800 2008 Humble and sparse and unerringly true. Carver knew how to make your heart stop with one or two moments withing the turning of a phrase.
I prefer his poetry, overall, to his prose, except for the undeniable stories "Cathedral" and so forth.
But its his poe...more...]]>
40falsefalseMon Oct 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007Mon Sep 17 08:50:07 -0700 2007Sat Oct 20 08:41:28 -0700 200710falsefalseMon Nov 05 16:45:47 -0800 2007Wed Mar 12 16:50:49 -0700 2008 this book made me hate Carver, hate his wife(s), hate his children, hate his house and cigarette smoking epiphanies, hate his nostalgia etc...
don't read this book. never ever read this book.]]>
00falsefalseFri Jul 25 10:34:55 -0700 2008Fri Jul 25 10:35:42 -0700 2008 Suppose I say summer, write the word “hummingbird,” put in an envelope, take it down the hill to the box. When you open my letter you will recall those days and how much, just how much, I love you.]]>
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