Book Review – Ultramarine by Raymond Carver
Subpar Poetry by the Late, Acclaimed Short-Story Writer
Raymond Carver (1938-1988) is often hailed as a writer’s writer, someone whose craft and voice are just as important as the story itself. He uses the language of the people he writes about to tell their story, and though he’s been labeled a minimalist, his work is more of that of a precisionist. Carver wastes no words, and his portions are perfect. To place Carver in the top three short story writers of all time would be no exaggeration. However, the poetry in his 1986 collection Ultramarine (Vintage, ISBN: 0394755359) leaves a lot to be desired.
Too Much Fiction in the Poetry, Not Enough Fiction in the Poetry
While Carver's stories are able to carry sparse poetic moments (the drawing at the end of “Cathedral” or the barber moving his hands through the man’s hair in “The Calm,” to name two) through the strength of the narrative, his poems have almost no narrative to speak of. A poem like “Limits” is almost successful because Carver spreads it out a bit and lets some sort of form emerge, but even then he relies too heavily on the abstract.
A Lack of Concrete Language Works Against Carver's Poems
Carver has always used the abstract well, and it’s disappointing to see him fail so miserably at mastering that same trait in his poetry. The vast majority of these poems are like the last line of the story “Fat” (“Waiting for what? I’d like to know. My life is going to change. I feel it.”), where the reader is allowed to have the whimsy because they’ve been set-up for it.
These poems begin and end with arbitrary people doing arbitrary things, and they eat their slice of life without sharing. This all goes back to the poems being too much like the stories: from-the-gut tales of yore as told by an almost-dead Grandfather, the only man who can tell the same story as everyone else, but make it matter. Here’s the difference: same Grandpa, same stories, except he’s senile now and can only get out bits and pieces. Everything’s disjointed and the listener can only shrug, because even though the story and the people in it probably matter, he’s just not convincing enough.
An Occasional Genius
Though Carver's poetry lacks what made his fiction so successful, there are lines that stand out as being amongst his most honest and harrowing work. A line like "What I've trampled on in order to stay alive" (From "This Morning") stands out for its acknowledgment of desperation, its claiming of the ghosts. while these lines aren't enough to carry the poetry all the way to the end, they are solid and resonating in and of themselves.
If reading this collection as a curious fan of Carver's short fiction, a reader is advised to go into the work easily and with an open mind. As an anthology of simplicity and satisfied emptiness, these poems nearly succeed, which is more heartbreaking than any singular piece of writing contained between the covers.
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Ultramarine Cover
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