Rivers, Reflections, and Memories in Raymond Carver’s Where Water Comes Together with Other Water

Abstract

ABSTRACT Where Water Comes Together with Other Water is a collection of poems published by Raymond Carver in 1985. As the aquatic title suggests, many of these poems feature rivers and creeks. The aim of my contribution is to analyse the function of rivers in Carver’s poetry, pointing out how their presence is not only part of a confessional tendency. They are also part of an epiphanic kind of poetic that uses small incidents and natural elements as correlative objectives. That is what rivers are within this collection: correlative objectives of distant and buried memories, of fears, of love, of ageing, of a way of looking at the external world, to say it with Carver’s words, ‘in absolute and simple amazement’.