A New Path to the Waterfall

Poetry was as important to Raymond Carver as his short stories and this collection sounds a key-note of enjoyment in the present rather than regret for the past. In the introduction, his widow gives a moving account of his last days, his love of Chekhov and the poems of Czeslaw Milosz.

Short-story writer and poet Carver, who died of cancer in 1988, wrote these poems during his last few months. Many of them are luminous flashes, poised and tender meditations, while others read like cathartic, unresolved statements by a man struggling to come to terms with his life in the little remaining time allotted to him. The verses range from story-poems to bone-bare nature lyrics to a sprawling allegory about "the two brothers, Sleep and Death." Carver tosses off word-portraits of a drunken Alexander the Great, Antonin Artaud, an encyclopedia salesman. A strain of bitterness runs through the entries dealing with his first marriage, while the touching love poems to his second wife, Tess Gallagher (who wrote the book's moving, highly personal introduction) carry a sense of finality that augments their meaning.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Though Carver is generally acknowledged to be a master of the short story, his first published work was poetry, and this collection, his last work, was completed shortly before his untimely death. His poetry is as recognizably his own as his stories and like them evokes depths of meaning beneath a surface simplicity. In her moving introduction, Carver's widow, writer Tess Gallagher, notes how often a particular poem calls to mind a corresponding story, and the reverse is also true. Indeed, to know Carver by his prose is to know him only partially. Master at illuminating those often mundane moments that starkly dramatize entire lives, Carver was also master at creating mood, and many of these poems have a striking lyrical intensity, especially when Carver unflinchingly faces death while celebrating life. A coda to a remarkable literary career.
- Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.