Where Water Comes Together with Other Water

by Raymond Carver

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780394743271
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/12/1986
Series:	Vintage Contemporaries
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.21(w) x 7.94(h) x 0.33(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

1
	Woolworth's, 1954	3
	Radio Waves	6
	Movement	8
	Hominy and Rain	9
	The Road	11
	Fear	12
	Romanticism	13
	The Ashtray	14
	Still Looking Out for Number One	16
	Where Water Comes Together With Other Water	17
2
	Happiness	21
	The Old Days	22
	Our First House in Sacramento	24
	Next Year	25
	To My Daughter	27
	Anathema	29
	Energy	31
	Locking Yourself Out, Then Trying to Get Back In	32
	Medicine	34
	Wenas Ridge	35
	Reading	37
	Rain	38
	Money	39
	Aspens	40
3
	At Least	43
	The Grant	44
	My Boat	45
	The Poem I Didn't Write	47
	Work	48
	In the Year 2020	49
	The Juggler at Heaven's Gate	50
	My Daughter and Apple Pie	51
	Commerce	52
	The Fishing Pole of the Drowned Man	53
	A Walk	54
	My Dad's Wallet	55
4
	Ask Him	59
	Next Door	62
	The Caucasus: A Romance	63
	A Forge, and a Scythe	66
	The Pipe	67
	Listening	68
	In Switzerland	69
5
	A Squall	75
	My Crow	76
	The Party	77
	After Rainy Days	78
	Interview	79
	Blood	80
	Tomorrow	81
	Grief	82
	Harley's Swans	83
6
	Elk Camp	87
	The Windows of the Summer Vacation Houses	89
	Memory	92
	Away	93
	Music	94
	Plus	95
	All Her Life	96
	The Hat	97
	Late Night With Fog and Horses	100
	Venice	102
	The Eve of Battle	103
	Extirpation	104
	The Catch	105
	My Death	106
	To Begin With	108
	The Cranes	111
7
	A Haircut	115
	Happiness in Cornwall	117
	Afghanistan	118
	In a Marine Light Near Sequim, Washington	119
	Eagles	120
	Yesterday, Snow	121
	Reading Something in the Restaurant	122
	A Poem Not Against Songbirds	123
	Late Afternoon, April 8, 1984	124
	My Work	126
	The Trestle	128
	For Tess	130

Editorial Reviews

Winner of Poetry Magazine’s Levinson Prize

"Over the years, Raymond Carver has been writing poetry alongside his fiction—same of his earlier verse appeared in a recent anthology titled Fires—and the most vigorous poems in this new collection function as distilled, heightened versions of his stories, offering us fugitive glimpses of ordinary lives on the edge." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"The stories poems tell are so wonderfully self-contained, so self-evident, so gracefully metaphorical." —The Village Voice

"Carver's voice is direct, his themes universal." —The Seattle Past-Intelligencer

"There is a severity of language, an understatement of emotion, that endows the poem of his first major collection with the feel of extraordinary experience. To read them is to have the sense this man has l 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

"The emotional impact of his scenes and slices of life is imparted without strain; the voice speaks: with such an uncanny directness and ease—and remarkable intimacy—that the reader may wander at poem's end how such simplicity can carry such power...Somehow the nuances of daily experience, the warmth, humor, and reflection the poet brings to his subject are quite unlike anyone else's, bath in his immediacy and in the ability to make us identify and be moved. A splendid book." —Booklist

From the Publisher

Best-known for his wonderful short stories (What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, etc.), Carver works the same narrative magic in these poems. In everyday language he offers memories of his family and past loves, uses fishing and hunting events to portray his innermost thoughts about life and death. PW called these poems ``accessible and lovely.'' (April)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly