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by: Raymond Carver
List Price: $15.00Amazon.com's Price: $10.20 You Save: $4.80 (32%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.54
EAN: 9780375703805
ISBN: 0375703802
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 416
Publication Date: April 04, 1996
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: April 04, 2000
Sales Rank: 163572
Studio: Vintage
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Editorial Review:
Amazon.com:
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
Product Description:
'Carver's poetry is like an almost invisible strand of fishing line reeling us all together, connecting us by the heart.' --San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle
This prodigiously rich collection suggests that Raymond Carver was not only America's finest writer of short fiction, but also one of its most large-hearted and affecting poets. Like Carver's stories, the more than 300 poems in All of Us are marked by a keen attention to the physical world; an uncanny ability to compress vast feeling into discreet moments; a voice of conversational intimacy, and an unstinting sympathy.
This complete edition brings together all the poems of Carver's five previous books, from Fires to the posthumously published No Heroics, Please. It also contains bibliographical and textual notes on individual poems; a chronology of Carver's life and work; and a moving introduction by Carver's widow, the poet Tess Gallagher.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - a book of poetry to carry with you
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, ... Read More
Rating: - True life as true literature
There are a number of good qualities about the poems of Carver. They are written in a simple clear language. The reader can understand them. They are about events and relations between people, and tell little stories. This makes them more interesting than if they were simply about his own isolated feelings. They have strong feelings in them. And they have an appreciation for many of the good things in life, loving others, beauty of literature. They too show at times a world of destitution, suffering ... Read More
Rating: - Transcendent Beauty
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 ... Read More
Rating: - Minimal is a Good Thing
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 ... Read More
Rating: - all of us - the collected poems by raymond carver
Someone told me once that this was a book of poems for men. I am not sure this is the case, but I found them absolutely beautiful, real, sad, so direct that I feel like living them.
I prefer Carver' poems than his prose...but you should choose... one of the best and more contemporary books of poems I have ever read...
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