All of Us

“Raymond Carver wrote beautiful poems: tender, lucid and direct. If he hadn’t written his stories, he would be acknowledged as the splendid poet he is. But, like Thomas Hardy, the prose overshadows the poems. That is bound to change with time, as it has with Hardy, another formidable artist in both genres.”

— Carolyn Kizer

“Among the great American writers of the 20th century, no question, Carver is the most endearing. He carries our humanity into the 21st.”

— Hayden Carruth

“Carver’s mature poetry shares many of the strengths of his short stories—a compassion that never makes excuses or romanticizes, and a directness that is never merely prosaic. This poetry hits home.… [T]he major poems embed themselves in the memory with the honed simplicity of a blues riff.”

—
Poetry Flash

“[Carver’s poetry is] infused with a largesse of spirit that adds a new dimension to the impression of the man left by the cool perfection of his stories.… The cumulative effect is exhilarating.”

—
Times Literary Supplement
(London)

“Carver is a writer of immense consequence. The best of his poems become unforgettable even as one reads them for the first time. They are like traffic accidents, or miraculous escapes. We come away gasping, shaken, and in awe.”

—Greg Kuzma,
Michigan Quarterly Review

“These poems evoke the landscape of Carver’s native Pacific Northwest perhaps even more vividly than his fiction does, stripping away everything extraneous or superficial and taking us to emotional bedrock.… [His poetry] reads with a spare, stoic power … often breath-taking.”

—
Seattle Times

“[Carver] made the ordinary extraordinary, and we continue to be enthralled by the deftness of his touch and the humanness of the predicament.”

—
Newsday

“[Carver’s] poems are full of precise image and unadorned truth.”

—
Miami Herald

“This is writing stripped of pretense.… It is ultimately a meditation on the things which shape all of our lives: loneliness, fear, hope, loss, love. More than anything, love.”

—
Independent
(London)

FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EBOOK EDITION, MAY 2015

Copyright © 1996 by Tess Gallagher
Editor’s preface, commentary, and notes copyright © 1996 by William L. Stull

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in Britain by The Harvill Press, London, in 1996, and subsequently in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 1998. Subsequently published in trade paperback by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2000.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98—15880

Poems from the collections
Where Water Comes Together with Other Water
by Raymond Carver, copyright © 1984, 1985 by Tess Gallagher, and
Ultramarine
by Raymond Carver, copyright © 1986 by Tess Gallagher, are reprinted here by permission of Random House, Inc.

The Introduction to
A New Path to the Waterfall
by Tess Gallagher, copyright © 1989 by Tess Gallagher, is reprinted here as
Appendix 2
.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Dilia:
“Wet Picture” by Jaroslav Seifert, translated by Ewald Osers, from
Selected Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert.
Reprinted by permission of the Heirs of Jaroslav Seifert, administered by DILIA.
The Ecco Press:
“Gift” by Czeslaw Milosz, translated by Czeslaw Milosz; “Return to Krakow in 1880” by Czeslaw Milosz, translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass;
“Ars Poetica?”
by Czeslaw Milosz, translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Lillian Vallee, from
The Collected Poems 1931—1987
by Czeslaw Milosz, copyright © 1988 by Czeslaw Milosz Royalties, Inc. “The Name” from
Selected Poems of 1954—1986
by Tomas Transtromer, edited by Robert Hass, translated by Robert Bly, translation copyright © 1987 by Robert Bly. Reprinted by permission of The Ecco Press.
The Estate of William Matthews:
Excerpt from “Cows Grazing at Sunset” from
Flood
by William Matthews, copyright © William Matthews (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1982). Reprinted by permission of The Estate of William Matthews.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.:
Excerpts from “Across Siberia,” “The Peasants,” “Perpetuum Mobile,” “An Unpleasantness,” and “A Visit to Friends” from
The Unknown Chekhov: Stories and Other Writings of Anton Chekhov Hitherto Unpublished
, translated by Avrahm Yarmolinsky, translation copyright © 1954 by Avrahm Yarmolinsky, translation copyright renewed 1982 by Ms. Babette Deutsch Yarmolinsky. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.
The Gallery Press:
Excerpt from “Mt. Gabriel” from
Antarctica
by Derek Mahon (1985). Reprinted by permission of the author and The Gallery Press.
A. P. Watt Ltd.:
Excerpts from “The Privy Councillor,” “The Wife,” “Difficult People,” and “A Dreary Story” from
The Wife and Other Stories
, excerpt from “The Bird Market” from
The Cook’s Wedding and Other Stories
, excerpts from “A Nightmare” and “Ward No. 6” from
The Bishop and Other Stories
, by Anton Chekhov, translated by Constance Garnett. Reprinted by permission of A. P. Wyatt Ltd. on behalf of The Executors of the Estate of Constance Garnett.

The Notes (see
this page
) give details of first publication, small-press and limited edition publication of works by Raymond Carver and constitute a continuation of this copyright page.

Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-375-70380-5
eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-97053-9

Cover design by Buchanan-Smith LLC

Cover photograph © Todd Hido / Edge Reps

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

and reading to me about Anna Akhmatova’s stay there with Modigliani.

I dedicate this edition of Raymond Carver’s poems
to four couples, dear sustaining friends to Ray
and me: Bill and Maureen, Harold and Lynne,
Alfredo and Susan, Dick and Dorothy.

T.G.