A New Path to the Waterfall

Rating:
Summary: A passionate and insightful collection
Review: I've read this book a number of times now and it never fails to move me deeply. The 14 page introduction by Tess Gallagher, a touching account Carver's final months and their efforts to compile this collection in the face of his impending death, brings the poems to life and gives them an added urgency and passionate clear sightedness. At times ironic, at times a sardonic observor of life's foibles, and at times utterly transparent and vulnerable, Carver is never less than a great crafter of poetic visions.

Rating:
Summary: A passionate and insightful collection
Review: I've read this book a number of times now and it never fails to move me deeply. The 14 page introduction by Tess Gallagher, a touching account Carver's final months and their efforts to compile this collection in the face of his impending death, brings the poems to life and gives them an added urgency and passionate clear sightedness. At times ironic, at times a sardonic observor of life's foibles, and at times utterly transparent and vulnerable, Carver is never less than a great crafter of poetic visions.

Rating:
Summary: The Style is the Man
Review: Raymond Carver, whom I had the fortuitous pleasure of having lunch with, along with his girfriend Tess Gallagher, a couple of years before he died, was a true artist. Emily Dickinson puts poets above the sun and God in pantheon of what's most important, and people like Raymond Carver prove her right. Although this last offering by the 20th century's greatest minimalist writer is neither his greatest nor his most minimal, it strikes the same generous chord of longing, of heart warming simplicity and heart breaking honesty, that Carver strikes elsewhere. The style is the man, wrote Buffon (in French), and sure enough that is the case here: a style of simple emotional honesty, combined with an artist's experimental will to playfulness, sufffused with a hope whose transcendent beauty is precisely its distillation from the undoctored elements of ordinary reality. This book, enhanced and completed by Tess Gallagher's wonderfully loving but unsentimental introduction, shows Carver at the end of his life; still excited about art, and the possibility of the poem form, he splices lines from Chekov stories, giving them titles and thereby
transforming them into poem epigraphs to his own measured prose. The transformation of the Chekov short story to the Carver poem perhaps underscores the poetic process itself, whittling down reality into its artistic essence--the process so aptly demonstrated by Carver, who never wrote a novel, in his short stories. As Salmon Rushdie says on the cover (I paraphrase), read this book by Carver. Read everything by Carver. Raymond Carver was a great writer.

Rating:
Summary: real poetry
Review: this is real poetry. raymond carver is a reflective and insightful poet. there is no denying his powerful way with words. there is a warmth and closeness to his tales that seem painfully close to real life, to our lives. there are also verses by Chekov who is just incredible. i can not describe the visions speaking in this book. But they move and surge and plunge into your heart and speak clearly.