"Over the years, Raymond Carver has been writing poetry alongside his fiction--same of his earlier verse appeared in a recent anthology titled Fires--and the most vigorous poems in this new collection function as distilled, heightened versions of his stories, offering us fugitive glimpses of ordinary lives on the edge." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"The stories poems tell are so wonderfully self-contained, so self-evident, so gracefully metaphorical." --The Village Voice

"Carver's voice is direct, his themes universal." --The Seattle Past-Intelligencer

"There is a severity of language, an understatement of emotion, that endows the poem of his first major collection with the feel of extraordinary experience. To read them is to have the sense this man has l lived more than most of us. We trust him because of the plainly conversational diction and the lapel-grabbing rhythms....They are very moving, very memorable." --Poetry

"The emotional impact of his scenes and slices of life is imparted without strain; the voice speaks: with such an uncanny directness and ease--and remarkable intimacy--that the reader may wander at poem's end how such simplicity can carry such power...Somehow the nuances of daily experience, the warmth, humor, and reflection the poet brings to his subject are quite unlike anyone else's, bath in his immediacy and in the ability to make us identify and be moved. A splendid book." --Booklist