SOURCE: Runyon, Randolph Paul. Epilogue to Reading Raymond Carver, pp. 207-16. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1993.

In the following essay, some of Carver's late poems are read as strategies for interpreting other works by Carver, as well as intimating an ability to interpret the motives and intentions of other people.

His wife gone, the narrator in “Blackbird Pie,” still troubled by “the question of the handwriting” (510), suggests one more interpretive strategy—actually two—to supplement that of “picking out a line here and a line there” (501) and setting them side by side. If “my wife writes more letters, or tells a friend who keeps a diary … then, years later, someone can look back on this time, interpret it according to the record, its scraps and tirades, its silences and innuendos” (510-11). To read the “silences and innuendos” of Carver's fiction has been our task in these pages...