All of Us Read Free Page A

of nature and life observed moment to moment. We feel befriended and accompanied by the spirit in these. Ray’s often third-person fictionalized stance places him alongside the reader, watching with conflicting feelings asevents unfold. He is a poet of great suppleness of being, and his ability to hold contraries in balance while sorting out their ramifications, not oversubscribing to either side, amounts to courage for us all.
    We are often with the poems as we are with our neighbors and loved ones, taking them for granted, failing deeply to assess their comings and goings—we are that used to them. Then one day something happens. A father’s wallet, an ordinary, familiar object, comes into our hands, suddenly luminous with the power of the dead. In the final moments of Ray’s “My Dad’s Wallet”—perhaps a working-class version of Rilke’s “Washing the Corpse”—it is “our breath coming and going” which signals death’s communal arrival. Readers of his fiction will recognize that this phrase overlaps the ending of his story “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love”. Sometimes, without embarrassment, Ray used the same events or recognitions in both poems and stories. The poems often clarify emotional or biographical ground left obscure in the stories. “Use it up,” he used to say. “Don’t save anything for later.”
    In the last lines of “The Caucasus: A Romance” the speaker calls his effort to represent what took place “but a rough record of the actual and the passing”. This line might be a talisman for what Ray aimed at throughout—the felicitous hazard of rough record. While we may locate his pulse with this phrase, we must also understand that he revised tirelessly and that “rough” indicates truth unbeguiled, not carelessness. Ray meant to graft language onto experience in all its tenacious vitality, its rawness. To that end he gave us “yellow jackets and near / frostbite” (“Trying to Sleep Late on a Saturday Morning in November”), the “large dark bullethole / through the slender, delicate-looking / right hand” (“Wes Hardin: From a Photograph”), a heart “on the table” that is “a parody of affection” (“Poem for Dr Pratt, a Lady Pathologist”), the young man “who keeps on drinking / and getting spit on for years” (“Reading”). His brilliant intuition for moments of consequence can wield a scythe across a lifetime—“The dying body is a clumsy partner” (“The Garden”)—or discover “violets cut just an hour before lunch” (“The Pipe”).
    There is the feeling that all Ray’s poems are in some sense escapes into the act of self-witness, as in “The Poem I Didn’t Write”. Each one bears the scarred patina of words gotten down on the page however the writer could, something wrestled from the torrent, using only that language which came readily, even haphazardly. Artifice gives way to velocity, to daring—“But the soul is also a smooth son of a bitch” (“Radio Waves”)—to improvisation and exactitude of the moment: “At night, a moon broad and deep as a serving dish / sallies out” (“The Caucasus: A Romance”).Clichés go by like underbrush: “my hair stood on end” (“Wenas Ridge”). Then suddenly we are ambushed by memory “like a blow to the calf” (also “Wenas Ridge”). Clichés in Carver cajole the actual, until his attentiveness brings the next nuance of miracle into focus: “Suddenly as at a signal, the birds / pass silently back into pine trees” (“With a Telescope Rod on Cowiche Creek”). His diction and syntax are American and find their antecedents in William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg, Emily Dickinson and Louise Bogan. He also absorbed poets I brought close, including Rainer Maria Rilke, Theodore Roethke, Paul Celan, William Heyen, Seamus Heaney, Federico García Lorca, Robert Lowell, Czeslaw Milosz, Marianne Moore, Derek Mahon, W. B. Yeats and Anna Akhmatova.
    From the vantage of his