New Path to the Waterfall

Product Description Raymond Carver, author of Where I'm Calling From, is widely considered one of the great short story writers of our time. A New Path to the Waterfall was Carver's last book, and shows a writer telling the truth as best as he knows how in the time left to him. The sixty-odd poems in this collection are linked by Carver with selections from other writers, most notably Chekhov, whose work was an inspiration and a guide, and by the cumulative force of the life and death questions he poses in them. As Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet guided countless readers discovering their true love and work, Carver's book will guide those in the process of celebrating a limited life and mourning the inescapable end of it. A New Path to the Waterfall is an essential book for those who admire Carver's work, and testament to the transcendent strength of the human spirit. In her introductory essay, Tess Gallagher, Carver's companion and fellow writer, lays out the circumstances of their last years together with matter-of-fact grace. From Publishers Weekly Carver, who died in 1988, wrote these poems during his last g months. "Many of them are luminous flashes, poised and tender meditations, while others read like cathartic, unresolved statements by a man struggling to come to terms with his life in the little remaining time allotted to him," found PW. Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review After-glow Another Mystery Artaud The Attic Caution Cherish Conspirators For The Record Gravy His Bathrobe Pockets Stuffed With Notes Hummingbird (for Tess) In A Greek Orthodox Church Near Daphne The Kitchen Late Fragment Lemonade Letter Looking For Work (2) The March Into Russia Margo The Moon, The Train Mriacle My Wife The Net No Need The Offending Eel On An Old Photograph Of My Son One More Out The Painter & The Fish Poems Proposal Quiet Nights The Sturgeon Summer Fog Sunday Night Suspenders Thermopylae This Word Love Threat Through The Boughs The Toes Transformation Two Worlds Wake Up What The Doctor Said Wine Woman Bathing The World Book Salesman The Young Girls Return To Krakow In 1880 Wet Picture The Name -- Table of Poems from From Library Journal Though Carver is generally acknowledged to be a master of the short story, his first published work was poetry, and this collection, his last work, was completed shortly before his untimely death. His poetry is as recognizably his own as his stories and like them evokes depths of meaning beneath a surface simplicity. In her moving introduction, Carver's widow, writer Tess Gallagher, notes how often a particular poem calls to mind a corresponding story, and the reverse is also true. Indeed, to know Carver by his prose is to know him only partially. Master at illuminating those often mundane moments that starkly dramatize entire lives, Carver was also master at creating mood, and many of these poems have a striking lyrical intensity, especially when Carver unflinchingly faces death while celebrating life. A coda to a remarkable literary career. - Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.