About the Author

RAYMOND CARVER was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938. His first collection of stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please (a National Book Award nominee in 1977), was followed by What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Cathedral (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1984), and Where I'm Calling From in 1988, when he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died August 2, 1988, shortly after completing the poems of A New Path to the Waterfall.

Reviews

"His eye is so clear, it almost breaks your heart." —The Washington Post Book World

"The best poems play like short stories in miniature, small heartrending scenes that resonate with telling detail...the lyrical reflections in his poems are as much a part of his formidable legacy as his incomparable stories." —The Philadelphia Inquirer

"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

Before his untimely death in 1988 at the age of 50, Carver had acquired an enviable reputation as one of America's finest short-story writers. Now, ten years later, Carver's widow Tess Gallagher and editor William L. Stull have collected nearly all of Carver's poetic work into one volume, complete with bibliographic notes and indexes. Carver's poems, with their gritty grace, express the continual astonishment of a man who had rescued himself from alcoholic near-death and penury to achieve acclaim and something like wisdom. His poetry is a kind of idiosyncratic documentary of his memories, reading, and experience: at times, he wrote too much and reserved too little, which could never have been said of his stories, with their stylized and painful silences. At his best, Carver offers profoundly moving meditations on his life, not unlike D.H. Lawrence's unconventional poems: "Don't worry your head about me, my darling./ We weave the thread given to us./ And Spring is with me." For all poetry collections.‘Graham Christian, Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, MA

"His eye is so clear, it almost breaks your heart." -The Washington Post Book World

"The best poems play like short stories in miniature, small heartrending scenes that resonate with telling detail...the lyrical reflections in his poems are as much a part of his formidable legacy as his incomparable stories." -The Philadelphia Inquirer

"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