It’s about a husband and wife returning home on an airplane from their second bankruptcy proceeding. There’s a longish poem called “Miracle” in A New Path to the Waterfall, Carver’s last, posthumously published collection. Much is written these days about the pathology that keeps the poor poor Ray and his first wife Maryann, if they’d come along later, might have been textbook cases. As it was, though, they fed off each other, led each other on, and the eventual results were alcoholism, trouble with landlords and the law, and, not just one, but two bankruptcy filings. If she had been slightly more stable, they might have become upright citizens of the Republic, as predictable and boring as the rest of us. It was Ray’s misfortune to hook up with a girl slightly less stable, even, than he was. This circumstance largely shaped their lives for the next twenty years. They were the parents of two children, a boy and a girl, while still in their teens. Everyone wanted a piece of Raymond, to hear Raymond tell it, and everyone seemed to get more than his share.Ĭarver married at eighteen. Carver’s family-his wife, his kids, his feckless parents (his mother constantly threatening to kill herself)-were a treasure trove of material. And it’s what Carver had going for him: an interesting life, a life out of the ordinary, something worth reporting on. And to tell me if this snow keeps on / she intends to kill herself.” Now there’s an interesting opening-for a poem, or a piece of prose, or whatever. Take, for instance, the little poem “Mother” in the collection Ultramarine, which begins, “My mother calls to wish me a Merry Christmas. His best poems, and there are a number of pretty good ones, represent a triumph of content over technique, of feeling over method.
Still, though, Carver’s poetry is not without interest. Some have found this off-putting.įred Chappell, writing in the Kenyon Review, once said of a collection of Carver’s verse, “It is difficult to think of these productions as poems they stand in relation to poetry rather as iron ore does to a Giacometti sculpture.” That’s mean, but it’s easy enough to see where Chappell is coming from.
A typical Carver poem consists of sentences and phrases arranged on the page to resemble poetry, but don’t bother trying to scan them. He penned poems, it seems, when his short-story muscles needed a rest.Īnd, like Walt Whitman, he did it almost entirely in free verse. Which shouldn’t surprise us since prose is what his reputation mainly rests on. Raymond Carver wrote a prosy kind of poem.
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