SOURCE: Gallagher, Tess. Introduction to A New Path to the Waterfall: Poems, by Raymond Carver, pp. xvii-xxxi. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Gallagher, a poet in her own right and Carver’s wife, describes events with Carver in the months before his death and finds these events reflected in the poems contained in the collection.

This is a last book and last things, as we learn, have rights of their own. They don't need us, but in our need of them we commemorate and make more real that finality which encircles us, and draws us again into that central question of any death: What is life for? Raymond Carver lived and wrote his answer: “I've always squandered,” he told an interviewer, no doubt steering a hard course away from the lofty and noble. It was almost a law, Carver's law, not to save up...