Review by Choice Review
Better known as a writer of short fiction, Carver has been crafting poems for two decades now. This new volume establishes him as a master of the plain style. His poems are deceptively prosaic, yet each establishes a central image that resonates with a quiet often domestic beauty: ``... I have this little bite/ she gave me last night. A bruise/ coloring my lip today, to remind me.'' Carver aims ``to write in a way/ that would stop the heart,'' and poems such as ``Slippers,'' ``Kafka's Watch,'' and ``The Young Fire Eaters of Mexico City'' will touch readers. Carver's weakness is his ear, his lack of what Eliot termed ``the auditory imagination.'' These poems could manage more music. But such a large collection offers countless pleasures, and Carver's theme of ``tenderness'' allows him to range among lives and locales for poetry that is moving and memorable. Recommended for graduate, undergraduate, community college, and public libraries.-M. Waters, Salisbury State College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Raymond Carver has long and rightly been regarded as a major fiction writer and is often credited with restoring the status of the short story in America. But from the start, he has written poetry, and with the publication of this fifth collection, his many fans will (re-)discover in his verse the immensely appealing strengths of his fiction an acute eye for significant detail and an unerring ear for authentic speech, precision and economy of means, dramatic drive, and an uncanny knack for melding humor and pathos. To read Carver's poems is to enter, instantly, into a real but specially heightened world, inhabited by real people with all their problems (troubles with spouses, parents, children, work, booze, loneliness) but also, and more often here, simple happinesses (sharing a boat with friends, enjoying a cool summer evening, just being in the same room with someone you love). Many of these poems are melancholy, but more are joyful and all speak with an immediacy and with such unpretentious wisdom that even those who ``don't usually read poetry'' may be surprised to discover they've become poetry fans. JP. 811'.54 [CIP] 86-10221
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Carver's poignant, soul-searching mini-narratives about deathinterspersed with descriptions of natural beautyare a test of relationships between parents and between lovers, a projection of a shattered family of man onto a screen before which the poet stands angry and amazed. ``Attached/ to this world by nothing more than hope,'' the poet confronts each poem's episode of pain buoyed up by ``the workings of comfort.'' His mind dwells on varieties of humiliationhaving his eardrum broken by a frozen snowball, working in an autopsy room where a man's ``vital organs/lay in a pan beside his head,'' having earwigs crawl out of a rum cake. Yet he is resolved not to despair but to see these events as a part of ``So much that is mysterious . . . happening out there.'' Frank Allen, Assoc. Dean, Continuing Education, Allentown Coll., Center Valley, Pa. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
