All of Us: The Collected Poems of Raymond Carver -- Book Review

I hate to seem greedy - I have so much / to be thankful for already. / But I want to get up early one more / morning, at least. / And go to my place with some coffee and wait. / Just wait, to see what's going to happen.” 

There isn't enough of anything / as long as we live. But at intervals / a sweetness appears and, given a chance

prevails. 

By Raymond Carver

I remember reading Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and reading that he had taken the idea of the title from Raymond Carver's What I Talk About When I Talk About Love. In many other instances of Murakami's work, Carver is referenced again and again. He made such an impression on the man, and because I have enjoyed Murakami's work I knew to some extent I would enjoy Carver's work. I borrowed What We Talk About When We Talk About Love but was disappointed with it, and disappointed too in Murakami. Later, browsing someone's poetry website online, I found a poem by Carver that absolutely floored me. How I loved it! I realized how much attention Carver's short stories get and how little, at least to the general masses, his poetry gets. When I discovered a complete collection of his poetry had been published I knew I had to read it. 

The copy I'm reading is a Vintage Contemporary publication--with a very flexible cover and pages, very easy holdable. Even the pages smell good. On the back there's a picture of Raymond Carver--looking obstinate and boyish--a little petty, but also handsome in a very voracious way. I read the introduction by poet Tess Gallagher, his widow, and her words are very generous of his work. I learn that he almost literally drank himself to death. 

What I don't expect are his poems. By turns profound, silly, beautiful, and banal, by the time I finished reading the collection I had this strong sense of having vicariously lived someone's life, read someone's autobiography. It seemed like a sort of humble but aware contribution--like saying, I left behind no children but I left behind my life. As long as you read this I am alive. Like Jack Gilbert, whose poetry I also revere, he writes with simplicity and with no disdain for any topic. He isn't ashamed, as well, to refer to the people in his poetry with frankness, addressing them by their real names. To those who are admirers of his short stories, they would be pleased to know that his poetry, too, falls under dirty realism. These aren't the kind of poems by Keats or Shelley talking about rarefied phenomenon, but blunt poems, boyish poems. What a boy Raymond Carver remained to be! This sense of boyishness to me I feel has much to do with his awareness of his impending death, a sort of petulance at the unfairness of the world. At the same time, how majestically he approaches the topic!

Even the absence of a loved one as she goes away for a few days is marked with the trickling, poignant youth of his character, a moving honesty like this:

I won't sleep in our bed without you / No. It doesn't please me to do so. / I'll sleep where I damn well feel like it. / Where I sleep best when you are away / and I can't hold you the way I do. / On the broken sofa in the study. 

  

Sometimes I wondered if his honesty was something he exulted in, if it was done self consciously, if it was affectation, could someone write and feel like this without realizing it somehow -- for some of the poems, I felt he was falling into caricature, warping events to fit his eye and world instead of allowing those events, people, places, to enlarge, take on their own independent meanings and existences. This was clearest to me in poems like The World Book Salesman where he describes what he imagines to be the life of a book salesman who goes door to door selling encyclopedias, and how in the evening he eats alone / watches television / reads the newspaper with lust /... drawing a sort of melancholy empty existence for this man. For me this descended into caricature, yet at the same time I can't imagine how it could be written otherwise. So many contradictions. 

For me poems I liked less, such as the one mentioned above, are countered with poems that are unmistakably genuine, which are absolutely unforgettable, like Rain - a short poem of just nine lines -

Woke up this morning with

a terrific urge to lie in bed all day

and read. Fought against it for a minute.

Then looked out the window at the rain.

And gave over. Put myself entirely

in the keep of this rainy morning.

Would I live my life over again?

Make the same unforgivable mistakes?

Yes, given half a chance. Yes.

These poems, understandably, are entwined with death. As Gallagher notes, these poems were written for the most part a a year to six months before his death, when he knew his days were numbered. To me it was humbling and revealing to see the kinds of words a man would want to have remembered on his last days, the kinds of memories. Memories of fishing, the cruelties involved in the natural stuff and flow of the world, wine, wine, wine, beauty, love, heartbreak, women - the simple details and gestures and so much love. The most painful way of speaking about love, the most truthful. 

And all the small objects. He wrote about his father's wallet, the clothes he wore before being cremated, he wrote about phone calls, about dinners with friends, about his two wives, about his children, about Kafka and Murakami and Chekhov. He wrote about music. About medicine, doctors, the radio, Balzac, waitresses, teachers. he wrote about everything, and wrote about it simply and beautifully and honestly.

Again and again he returns to the purpose of his life, of his days. Was it worth it, he asks? To set aside time today / same as every day / for doing nothing at all ? To smoke, to write, to breathe, to stroll along Lake Geneva, to be a sailor returning once every few years for a beautiful girl who waits for him? The collection ends with the question:

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 liked: The imagery. The dirty realism. The humility. The beauty.

I disliked: There were some poems that seemed lazy. Like the poem where he listed all the things his car does one by one. (Nevertheless, how I understand the inclusion of those poems! It seems he wanted people to be sure: you know, I am just a man. These are only words. I shit and after I ejaculate my penis is flabby.)

95/100

One of my favorite collections of poetry to have read this year. Nearly on par with the collected poetry of Jack Gilbert.