Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver, sore sculptor

He never wrote a novel, the force of his art is also in his new, poems - whose accuracy words made sense, these same words that say life just what it takes. The poetry of the author is finally reunited in a single volume.

Do that for me this morning. Pulls back the curtain and bed.

Forget the coffee. We will pretend to be abroad and love.

The road

Throughout his life, Carver (1938-1988) wrote poetry. Accompanying his prose or inspiring his poems cut with a scalpel everyday life, sketched the gesture, the heart that is empty, money problems, couple, children, alcohol or the vision of a sofa smashed in a room stinking stale. They were, said his companion, the poet Tess Gallagher, "the spiritual power which inspired the first lines of his new".

A life for rent
Now that you're gone for five days

I'll smoke all the cigarettes I want

I have not finished taking care of me

Few American novelists have experienced comparable to that of Carver glory in the 1980s, recalls Carol Sklenicka whose biography Raymond Carver: Life seems a writing together the new edition of poems, published in Olivier. Consistently stating that existence has not spared, she traces his career, his battles, his wanderings, everything, it seems, was the breeding ground of his inspiration as a writer of fiction and poet. The book is exciting, sprinkled with testimonies and make up a portrait of a creator and a man's face.

Early on, there was love, she remembers. First for its first Maryann companion encountered in adolescence (she's only 14 years) and became the mother of their two children in just 18 years. At that time, Raymond knew that he would sacrifice everything for writing. Its Professor John Gardner who reads his poetry and his new and proves a tireless checker. "He had made me understand that when something was scratched, it was irrevocable," said Carver, sensitive to his criticism with fright but recognizing that he was a "perfectionist with furious obstinacy."

It was in those years that Raymond writes Furious Seasons, published for the first time in 1961 in the journal Selection, Chico. Writing workshops, advice, odd jobs, poor living conditions, scholarship applications are unsuccessful, trips that resemble unnecessary round trips, nothing prevents to write, sometimes in one go, texts like Shut up, I beg you. Scrupulously during these sixty years, Carver explores the world around him, the people on the brink of bankruptcy, leading a life lease. This is always what exists today in the minds of his readers and writers who continue to cite the reference.

"I like its scarcity in the sense that the stories he tells, even if they are mundane, are each sufficient to say a life, and one can imagine, are alone a lifetime to their divisions way. There is a kind of dignity that I like, and I like his way of telling which is part of a history and opens the way without showing off. His characters have a way of being close to us without worrying about pleasing us, "said Dominique Fabre, novelist, short story writer and French poet who shares this" scarcity "of which he speaks and that crosses borders, years, generations.