All of Us: The Collected Poems

I enjoy Carver's short stories and his poetry. This collection is wonderful -- real poetry by a real poet. Most of the poems are straight from his life. I like the plainspoken clarity of his writing, the believability. He is one of my favorite rough-around-the edges, pull no punches poets, in the manner of Carruth, Bukowski, and Kinnell. Many of Carver's poems are characterized by dysfunction and despair, laced with alcohol, choked with cigarette smoke, and life-defeating choices, unabashed testaments to a hard life. His free verse mini-chronicles of life on the margins often truncate without resolution, affirming all episodes in life don't conclude with clarity. Carver was a great talent. Hey, certainly one has to admire the creativity of someone who can turn a cobweb on a lampshade into a powerful poem. In the end I suspect he died a contented man, as intimated by the last poem in the collection: LATE 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. ~ I imagine Carver's testament is one most of us would like to make for ourselves when our time comes. I believe he was a man I would like to have known.

Before this book, I only knew Carver as a writer of short stories, some of my favorites, and after it I feel like I have met the man. It is somewhat daunting, a huge book of poetry, spanning more than a decade, but I was mostly sucked in from the start, and it didn’t let go. He was not a perfect man, probably not even a very good one, but who is? And who is brave enough to put the rawness of their struggles and failings on the page, for everyone to see and judge? Carver did, and they are stunning – as raw and powerful as his prose. I found this book exactly when I needed it, and as I worked through it, I appreciated what it had to say about life, love, loss, and being an imperfect person in an imperfect world. And sometimes - being reborn.

Raymond Carver is one of the finest American writers of short stories and, during his short liftime, (he died at age 50) was acclaimed for this talent. Critics seemed to create the term "minimalist" and label Carver with it---which I believe caused him a disservice. What are readers who do not know his body of work to make of this word: "minimalism?" Labels, in any field, never quite take the measure of the man. What, indeed, is a "compassionate conservative?" Does this label mean that an old-fashioned conservative automatically has no compassion? Does it mean that a "liberal" is automatically compassionate? And where do these labels take and leave us? For readers unfamiliar with Carver's work, does "minimalist" mean that he stints on imagery? on emotion? on plot? If you have never read Carver, you owe it to yourself to find out what all the shouting was/is about. In his stories and here, in this book of collected poems (some of which are published for the first time), he takes everyday life and makes it resonate with great feeling and extraordinary beauty---be the subject married love, nature, fatherhood, fishing or his quickly approaching death by cancer. I find one of the the final, very short poems in this book, "Late Fragment" almost unbearably moving. In it he tells us what he wanted in life: "To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth." Very Highly Recommended.

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 state of mind. As if we knew what the other was feeling. We don't, of course. We never do. No matter. It's the tenderness I care about. That's the gift this morning that moves me and holds me. Same as every morning. Carver didn't use reality to create poems; he saw the poetry and captured it.....for us. That's his gift.

I purchased this book after reading his collection of short stories This is What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and a few of his poems that I could find online. His poems, I think, function much like his short stories do: they are snippets of life, a moment or two captured in a few words. It makes for beautiful poetry most of the time, but some of the time it leads to a poem at the end of which you ask, so what? Which is why, hesitantly, rated this amazing collection 4 stars instead of 5.

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 and short descriptions. I am one of those who likes Carver's short stories as well as his poetry. He definitely has a masculine voice in all his work, but there is universality in the feelings. What I find more interesting than the "masculine" aspect of his writing (Hemingway was masculine too!) is his ability to write about city life and then go back to his roots in Oregon. Most writers have one of those locations in their souls. He has both and seems at home in both. Well, I like Raymond Carver. Could you tell? This is writing that never sought out a thesaurus and still gives more shades of interpretation than Roget ever considered.

Although he will always be remembered for his unsurpassed short stories, Raymond Carver is an equally great poet. Many themes appear and reappear in the course of his autobiographic poetry: fishing, his wife and his love for everything in the world, his conquering of his aloholism. Carver's poetry is easy to understand, as in his srories Carver has the knack of chosing the most precise words and of creating totally full characters in just a few words.Carver's main power as a poet is to make even the simplest things in life into epic journeys of a soul who has made his peace with the world. Just like the poetry, the introduction by Tess Harper broght tears to my eyes. If there is a heaven, I am sure Raymond Carver is there, fishing. He is the most human and for me one of the most remarkable of modern writers. Thanks for enriching my life!

I find myself reading and reading his poems as events in his life....and they are indeed. I have the great fortune to meet Tess Gallagher and hear her speak of her only true love in her poems. WOW! Are we blessed or WHAT!