SOURCE: Kuzma, Greg. “Ultramarine: Poems That Almost Stop the Heart.” Michigan Quarterly Review 27, no. 2 (spring 1988): 355-63.

In the following review, Kuzma praises the poems in Ultramarine for being “like traffic accidents, or miraculous escapes. We come away gasping, shaken, and in awe.”

Now and then a writer comes along whose work is so transparent it is seemingly formless, without design or designs, whose words are not some play or game with rules to violate or honor but experience delivered smoldering like new-born calves, a writer who though he has antecedents, literary kith and kin, yet seems genetically singular, unique, a one-of-a-kind blending of instinct and dilemma, possessing the urgency of a life as shabby as our own, and yet the courage of that life, a courage sufficient to it, and an eloquence out of its drear and dazzle. Raymond Carver is such a writer, speaking in these poems...