Winner of Poetry Magazine’s Levinson Prize • An illuminating collection of poems from the middle of Carver's career that “function as distilled, heightened versions of his stories, offering us fugitive glimpses of ordinary lives on the edge” ( The New York Times ). "The stories poems tell are so wonderfully self-contained, so self-evident, so gracefully metaphorical." — The Village Voice "There is a severity of language, an understatement of emotion, that endows the poems of his first major collection with the feel of extraordinary experience. To read them is to have the sense this man has lived more than most of us. We trust him because of the plainly conversational diction and the lapel-grabbing rhythms.... They are very moving, very memorable." —Poetry
Author
Carver was born into a poverty-stricken family at the tail-end of the Depression. He married at 19, started a series of menial jobs and his own career of 'full-time drinking as a serious pursuit', a career that would eventually kill him. Constantly struggling to support his wife and family, Carver enrolled in a writing programme under author John Gardner in 1958. He saw this opportunity as a turning point. Rejecting the more experimental fiction of the 60s and 70s, he pioneered a precisionist realism reinventing the American short story during the eighties, heading the line of so-called 'dirty realists' or 'K-mart realists'. Set in trailer parks and shopping malls, they are stories of banal lives that turn on a seemingly insignificant detail. Carver writes with meticulous economy, suddenly bringing a life into focus in a similar way to the paintings of Edward Hopper. As well as being a master of the short story, he was an accomplished poet publishing several highly acclaimed volumes. After the 'line of demarcation' in Carver's life - 2 June 1977, the day he stopped drinking - his stories become increasingly more redemptive and expansive. Alcohol had eventually shattered his health, his work and his family - his first marriage effectively ending in 1978. He finally married his long-term parter Tess Gallagher (they met ten years earlier at a writers' conference in Dallas) in Reno, Nevada, less than two months before he eventually lost his fight with cancer.
