Where Water Comes Together With Other Water by Raymond Carver (review)

Reviews 181 they belong. Traitors. All because of the railroad, which is going out of busi­ ness anyway. Why should I help? They’re fighting a losing battle, like the Pony Express and the telegraph. Buffalo Bill fighting with Marconi. Marconi? Morse. Morse?” ART CUELHO Big Timber, Montana Where Water Comes Together With Other Water. ByRaymond Carver. (New York: Random House, 1985. 130 pages, $13.95.) It is easy to find Carver the Story Teller in this collection of poems in seven sections. He sets scenes (“They’re alone at the kitchen table in her friend’s/apartment.”), establishes the tension for plot lines (“Long before the thought of his own death, / my dad said he wanted to lie close / to his par­ ents.”), and creates characters (“He took a room in a port city with a fellow / called Sulieman A. Sulieman and his wife, / an American known only as Bonnie.”) It is also easy to be cantankerous about some of the poems, seeing them as but true confessions of the literati. For the poems are full of the grief, alcoholism, failed relationships, and general angst readers of contemporary poetry have come to expect from the suffering artiste, who cannot just suffer like the rest of humanity, but has to be talking about it all the time. If the poems were merely poetic wrist-slashings, they would merit little comment,—some fine touches here and there, more than one sockobuffo end­ ing (to be expected from a short story writer of Carver’s skill), and spicy slices of someone else’s life that might or might not be palatable. The poems, how­ ever, rise above tabloid confessionalism in that almost every one of them can be read essentially as a love poem. The pain, the torment, the turmoil are all redeemed by love. Not love as sexual escapade or romantic cliché, but love as a complex, passionate, intellectual-emotional interaction with life, even though life is nearly always hard and often bitter. The title poem captures this notion the best, as the imagery of water coming together becomes the central metaphor for the narrator’s life: My heart empty and sere at 35: Five more years had to pass before it began to flow again. I’ll take all the time I please this afternoon before leaving my place alongside the river. It pleases me, loving rivers. Loving them all the way back to their source. Loving everything that increases me. 182 Western American Literature To this central vision, Carver brings a sharp eye for detail, relishing the com­ mon in life, finding in the smallest moment an insight that reveals larger truths. The poems wear the rhythms of everyday speech, but there isa marked lyricism that informs the poems, the kind of folk-jazz one associates with the piano skills of George Winston. Carver picks up a theme, drops it, picks it up again, elaborates on it, embellishes it, lets it drop again. The language in the poems has been pared to the bone, yet it remains graceful with a sure sense of the power of the free verse line. This collection demonstrates that Carver’s poetic skills are as refined as his fictional craft. RICHARD BEHM University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Herbert Krause. Boise State Western Writers Series, No. 66. By Arthur R. Huseboe. (Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1985. 50 pages, $2.00.) William Everson. Boise State Western Writers Series, No. 67. ByLee Bartlett. (Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1985. 50 pages, $2.00.) John Haines. Boise State Western Writers Series, No. 68. ByPeter Wild. (Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1985. 51 pages, $2.00.) Sam Shepard. Boise State Western Writers Series, No. 69. By Vivian M. Patraka and Mark Siegel. (Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1985. 49 pages, $2.00.) Robert Cantwell. Boise State Western Writers Series, No. 70. By Merrill Lewis. (Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1985. 54 pages, $2.00) Charles Sealsfield. Boise State Western Writers Series, No. 71. By Walter Grünzweig. (Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1985. 54 pages, $2.00.) Boise’s “Western Writers Series” continues to provide an invaluable service. Space limitations oblige me to be brutally brief in the...