ALL OF US: THE COLLECTED POEMS. Raymond Carver. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. 386 pp.
At his death in 1988 at the age of fifty, Raymond Carver was best known for his superbly crafted short stories. Many of these stories were published in The New Yorker, and a few were combined into a script for Shortcuts, a film by Robert Altman.
Among his fellow writers, Carver was regarded as a genius who used the American idiom to create stories which have pathos and radiance and yet are grounded in realistic situations which any American can recognize. It was this mastery that prompted the London Guardian to call Carver 'America's Chekhov,' and the literary establishment to bestow on him many honors including a Guggenheim fellowship and membership in the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
What many readers of Carver's stories may not know is that Carver was also an accomplished poet. Four major collections of his poems were published in his lifetime, as well as several limited edition chapbooks.
The four major collections, as well as supplementary material of interest to scholars and die-hard Carver fans, are brought together in this solidly bound and attractively printed book.
Most of Carver's poems published in All of Us were written in the last ten years of his life, over two hundred of them between October 1983 and August 1985, after Carver resigned from his teaching post at Syracuse and began writing full-time.
The poems make for rich reading. In the background of many of the poems are Carver's recovery from alcoholism and ten years later his being diagnosed with a brain tumor. Here is one of my favorite poems, Gravy, in its entirety:
No other word will do. For that's what it was. Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving and
being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going. And he was going
nowhere but down. So he changed his ways
somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and
building up inside his head. "Don't weep for me,"
he said to his friends. "I'm a lucky man.
I've had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected. Pure gravy. And don't forget it."
Sometimes the directness and simplicity of these poems is beguiling. The way Carver captures the music of the American vernacular brings to mind the poems of William Carlos Williams, as in the short poem Loafing:
I looked into the room a moment ago,
and this is what I saw --
my chair in its place by the window,
the book turned facedown on the table.
And on the sill, the cigarette
left burning in its ashtray.
Malingerer! my uncle yelled at me
so long ago. He was right.
I've set aside time today,
same as every day,
for doing nothing at all.
For a long time, Carver lived on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state, an area famous for its natural beauty. Sometimes the descriptions of the streams and rivers echo passages from Thoreau's journals, as in Carver's poem Evening:
I fished alone that languid autumn evening.
Fished as darkness kept coming on.
Experiencing exceptional loss and then
exceptional joy when I brought a silver salmon
to the boat, and dipped a net under the fish.
Secret heart! When I looked into the moving water
and up at the dark outline of the mountains
behind the town, nothing hinted then
I would suffer so this longing
to be back once more, before I die.
Far from everything, and far from myself.
Many of the poems are addressed to his long-time companion, Tess Gallagher. Among my favorites is For Tess, which ends with these lines:
As I was lying there with my eyes closed,
just after I'd imagined what it might be like
if in fact I never got up again, I thought of you.
I opened my eyes then and got right up
and went back to being happy again.
I'm grateful to you, you see. I wanted to tell you.
Another of my favorites is Happiness, which concludes:
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale over the water.
Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn't enter into this.
Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.
A fan of Carver's stories may notice some overlap of phrasing, situation, and characters between his stories and his poems. For example, the poem My Dad's Wallet finishes with the phrase "our breath coming and going" which also concludes the story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. This overlap, instead of being distracting or redundant as one might expect, instead causes a pleasant feeling of recognition in the reader, like seeing an old friend again.
What are the qualities which draw us to Carver's stories and poems? Humor and grace certainly come to mind, as well as a fine sensibility and an unwillingness to 'poeticize.' One gets the feeling that this author has no patience for frills. He wants to give us just the facts that point us toward the mystery of being alive. The music of the poems comes not from clever word-play, but rather from the eloquence of hard-won wisdom. In some of the poems, the precise phrasing and clear imagery combine into a blinding radiance. In other poems, the story-teller's art takes over. What happens next becomes the driving force that gives energy and direction to the poem.
Carver is like the perfect companion for a long trek: quiet most of the time, but with sudden bursts of eloquence, good anecdotes, and a willingness to listen.
There is an immediacy about many of the poems, especially the ones written in the last months of his life, as if they were hastily dashed off by someone on his way somewhere, someone who had important things to say and didn't have time to try for the exact right phrase. Carver had discovered some important truths in his life, and he needed to tell us what they were before he left.
All of Us: The Collected Poems is an important volume for casual readers and scholars alike. The poems are enjoyable for their interesting characters, conversational style, and profound emotional punch. But the volume also contains critical and biographical material of interest to serious afficionados. Especially fascinating are the annotated chronology of this important writer's life and Tess Gallagher's lyrical and insightful introduction.
Michael Simms is the author of a collection of poems Migration, as well as the co-author (with Jack Myers) of The Longman Dictionary of Poetic Terms. Simms teaches English at Carnegie Mellon and Duquesne.
