Carver Raymond: Svi mi

Raymond Carver: All of us - collected poems

Collected poems of the great American poet who had a decisive influence on contemporary Croatian literature. Like few writers, Carver marked the last decade in Croatian literature. Many Croatian writers rightly, and sometimes without it, referred to this poetic master as their role model. In any case, Raymond Carver is one of the most present characters on our literary scene. He gained world fame with short stories, but throughout his life he was and remained an original, great American poet who combined the great Bukowski and the great Hemingway in his poetry. The profile presents his collected poems in an excellent translation by the poet Damir Šodan. The adventure begins! 

Carver grew up as the child of a poor sawmill worker. He got married right after school, at the age of nineteen. At twenty, he already had two children and had to support them by working, among other things, as a babysitter and delivery boy. At the same time, he surrendered to alcohol, like his father before him. 

He took up writing seriously after taking a creative writing course with John Gardner at Chico College in 1958. He started writing short stories because it was a form that allowed him to earn something right away.

During his studies at Humboldt State College in Arcata, his stories began to appear in magazines. He achieved his first success with the short story "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" (Would you please shut up, please? 1967).

Despite his success, Carver drowned in alcohol, was hospitalized four times for alcoholism, and after painful years of alcohol and drugs, he separated from his family, met Tess Gallagher, with whom he lived for the rest of his life. After numerous treatments, he finally manages to get rid of his alcohol addiction. Later, he described his alcoholic experiences in the collection of poems "Fires" (1977).

For the next several years, he taught at the University of California in Santa Cruz and Santa Barbara, until 1971, when he received a scholarship from the National Endowment for the Arts, so he could devote himself exclusively to writing. During that time, most of the stories for "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?", which made him famous after its publication in 1976, will be written.

Carver's remaining collections of short stories are "Furious seasons and Other Stories" (1977), "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" (1981), "The Pheasant" (1982), "Cathedral" 1984), which earned him Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award nominations, "If It Please You" (1984), and finally the collection "Where I'm Calling From" (1988). 

1983. receives new financial support: the Strauss "Living" Award, which enables him to write freely. This time poetry was accepted and thus the collections "Where Water Comes Together With Other Water", "Ultramarine" and "A New Path to Waterfall" were created.

Carver's short stories usually deal with the problems of failed marriages, women burdened by the vanity of life, drowning in alcohol and unsatisfied sexual needs that occasionally violently come to the surface. His characters feel that their lives should be better, they want freedom, but at the same time they are completely paralyzed. Nevertheless, although according to many one of the best short story writers in the history of American literature, Raymond Carver considered himself primarily a poet.

He died in 1988 in Port Angeles, in the extreme northwest of the USA, from lung cancer.