All of Us (2 page)

Raymond Carver’s life and work were cut short by his death at age fifty in 1988. As he makes plain in his poem “Gravy”, however, even in his final days Carver counted himself a lucky man, a writer who had packed two lives into the time of less than one.

During the last five years of his postalcoholic “second life” Carver saw through the press three major collections of his poetry:
Fires
(1983),
Where Water Comes Together with Other Water
(1985), and
Ultramarine
(1986). A fourth collection,
A New Path to the Waterfall
, completed in the last weeks of his life, was published posthumously in 1989.

The poems in these four books comprise the reading text of
All of Us
, and for the first time make available all of Raymond Carver’s poems in the final forms he approved. To enhance the picture of his development as a poet, Carver’s nineteen uncollected poems from
No Heroics, Please: Uncollected Writings
(1991) are printed in the
first appendix
. The
second appendix
contains Tess Gallagher’s introduction to
A New Path to the Waterfall.
The
third
and
fourth appendixes
offer detailed information about Carver’s small-press books and his English collection
In a Marine Light: Selected Poems
(1987) respectively. The
fifth appendix
contains bibliographical and textual notes on individual poems in
All of Us.
The
sixth appendix
provides a brief chronology of Carver’s life and work and the seventh and
final appendix
gives details of posthumous publications.

For this edition every known printing of each of Raymond Carver’s poems was collated against the editor’s copy-text: the first editions of
Fires, Where Water Comes Together with Other Water, Ultramarine, A New Path to the Waterfall
, and
No Heroics, Please.
The collation included magazine appearances, small-press publications, British editions, and advance uncorrected proofs. No use was made of manuscript materials, although setting typescripts were consulted wherever possible.

The headnotes in
Appendix 5
give the publication history of each of Carver’s major books of poetry. Bibliographical notes on individual poems record any first magazine appearance or separate publication (“
1st
”) that preceded the inclusion of the poem in the copy-text. All inclusions in other books by Raymond Carver are recorded, as are
any subsequent appearances in the form of broadsides, greeting cards, or limited editions. No bibliographical notes are given on poems published solely in the copy-text.

Textual notes provide a line-by-line record of variants between the copy-text and other printings of the poem. The variants recorded are selective rather than exhaustive. All changes in lineation are indicated, as are all verbal changes, with the exception of the categories listed below. The following six types of variants are not recorded except when they seem to have critical significance:

1) changes in spelling;

2) changes in punctuation;

3) changes in line runovers;

4) changes in the positioning of lines;

5) changes in spacing within lines or stanzas;

6) changes in anthology printings with which Carver had no direct involvement.