Description

Raymond Carver, who became a master-storyteller of his generation and was hailed in Europe as ‘the American Chekhov’, wrote of himself: “I began as a poet. My first publication was a poem. So I suppose on my tombstone I’d be very pleased if they put ‘Poet and short-story writer – and occasional essayist’, in that order.”

This complete edition allows readers to experience the range and overwhelming power of Carver’s poetry for the first time. It brings together in the order of their American publication the poems of Fires (1985), Where Water Comes Together with Other Water (1986), Ultramarine (1988), A New Path to the Waterfall (1989) and No Heroics, Please (1991).

For readers who know Carver’s middle period only through his selected poems, In a Marine Light (1988), it includes the windfall of 51 poems not previously published in Britain. All of Us is edited by Professor William L. Stull of the University of Hartford, and introduced with an essay on Raymond Carver’s methods of composition by his widow, the poet Tess Gallagher.

Publisher Review

What is never lost - or lost sight of- is the primacy of experience and the most direct way of finding its expression... The urgency of the artist not to trivialise, but to find the essence; plain language in which to lay bare the terror and beauty of plain lives -- John Harvey A year after the American writer's abrupt death, Salman Rushdie concluded a review of A New Path to the Waterfall, a final verse collection, by urging: 'Read everything Raymond Carver ever wrote.' It's very good advice * Irish Times * The cumulative effect is exhilarating: happiness, yes, but about as far as you can get from the bland, cosmic gruntlement currently being peddled by so many American poets * Times Literary Supplement * Better known for his short stories, Raymond Carver was also an accomplished poet, as this superbly presented collection attests -- Anthony Quinn * Harpers & Queen *