All of Us

Better known for his short stories, Raymond Carver was also an accomplished poet, as this superbly presented collection attests – Anthony Quinn * Harpers & Queen *
The cumulative effect is exhilarating: happiness, yes, but about as far as you can get from the bland, cosmic gruntlement currently being peddled by so many American poets * Times Literary Supplement *
A year after the American writer’s abrupt death, Salman Rushdie concluded a review of A New Path to the Waterfall, a final verse collection, by urging: ‘Read everything Raymond Carver ever wrote.’ It’s very good advice * Irish Times *
What is never lost - or lost sight of- is the primacy of experience and the most direct way of finding its expression… The urgency of the artist not to trivialise, but to find the essence; plain language in which to lay bare the terror and beauty of plain lives – John Harvey

Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938. His first short stories appeared in Esquire during Gordon Lish’s tenure as fiction editor in the 1970s. Carver’s work began to reach a wider audience with the 1976 publication of Will You Please be Quiet, Please?, but it was not until the 1981 publication of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love under Gordon Lish, then at Knopf, that he began to achieve real literary fame. This collection was edited by more than 40 per cent before publication, and Carver dedicated it to his fellow writer and future wife, Tess Gallagher, with the promise that he would one day republish his stories at full length. He went on to write two more collections of stories, Cathedral and Elephant, which moved away from the earlier minimalist style into a new expansiveness, as well as several collections of poetry. He died in 1988, aged fifty.

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