Vol. 2, Number 1	Spring 1999 issue

 

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Before his premature death from cancer at the age of fifty in 1988, Raymond Carver enjoyed a distinguished career as a writer of short fiction and a reputation as an important figure in modern American literature. Although his stories are more well-known, Carver, like his wife Tess Gallagher, was also a poet. In the past, his poetry has been largely overlooked, but a new book of Carver's collected poems, All of Us, establishes him in the genre that he viewed as essential to his body of work as a whole. Carver employs his personal experience and the world-view which has sprung from it to create his art. His method, articulated in the poem "Sunday Night," resonates through the body of his work:

Make use of the things around you.
This cigarette between my fingers,
These feet on the couch.
The faint sound of rock-and-roll,
The red Ferrari in my head.
The woman bumping
Drunkenly around in the kitchen...

What makes the poems in "All of Us" appealing is their manipulation of everyday situations and conversational vocabulary to reveal the true depth of the seemingly banal events Carver examines. One of the most beautiful examples of this is "Another Mystery," in which the narrator comes to a fuller understanding of death while running an everyday errand:

Just an hour or so ago...I picked up my own suit
from the dry cleaners and hung it carefully behind the back seat.
I drove it home, opened the car door
and lifted it out into the sunlight. I stood there a minute
in the road, my fingers crimped on the wire hanger. Then
tore a hole through the plastic to the other side. Took one of
the empty sleeves between my fingers and held it-
the rough palpable fabric. I reached through to the other side.

Unfortunately, the depth of the poems is not consistent. The simple importance of subject found in "Sunday Night," "Another Mystery," and in many other poems gives way to overly dramatic situations which cannot be captured effectively in Carver's style. After fifty pages, the cycle of alcoholism, divorce, and corrupted family relationships weighs his style down, making it something closer to therapy than art. The crises of Carver's life were, it seems, too painful to be portrayed as deeply as his other themes, yet also too immediate to be avoided in his poetry.

Nonetheless, the unique and insightful poems which form the majority of the material in "All of Us" lead the reader past the less worthy verses. Transcending the dramatic, stereotypically modern tragedies portrayed in other poems, Carver skillfully draws on all aspects of life to reveal insightful and touching themes. With subjects ranging from toes to Alexander the Great, Carver manages to stay true to the philosophy of "Sunday Night":

Put it all in

Make use.