Ultramarine Poems

"Mr. Carver is heir to that most appealing American poetic voice, the lyricism of Theodore Roethke and James Wright.... this book is a treasure, one to return to. No one's brevity is as rich, as complete, as Raymond Carver's." --New York Times Book Review "Carver's gifts as a storyteller shine through his poetry.... Sometimes a Carver poem also works as a short story, with all its elements--character, diction, place, event--compressed intact into the brevity of verse. And sometimes Carver delivers the goods in pure lyrical form, in words as full of yearning and sensibility as those of a very young man, but poems possessing the hard-won qualities of focus, stillness and irony only rewarded by experience." --Los Angeles Times

Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938. His first collection of stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please (a National Book Award nominee in 1977), was followed by What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Cathedral (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1984), and Where I'm Calling From in 1988, when he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died August 2, 1988, shortly after completing the poems of A New Path to the Waterfall.