Ultramarine - (Vintage Contemporaries) by Raymond Carver (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"Carver's gifts as a storyteller shine through his poetry" (Los Angeles Times) in this collection that moves from the beauty of the world to thoughts of mortality and family and art.

One of Raymond Carver's final collections of poetry, this collection "has the astonished, chastened voice of a person who has survived a wreck, as surprised that he had a life before it as that he has one afterward, willing to remember both sides" (The New York Times Book Review).

From the Back Cover

'Ultramarine is 'finally a sort of diary of spirit--the spirit released and soaring.'- Seattle Times Raymond 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.

Review Quotes

"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

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.