TO the reader, a poem can seem something that was very deliberately fashioned or something that just inevitably happened. To the writer, the task is often to make the former appear to be the latter, primarily because the reader is not interested in the creative strain that was involved. Indeed, most readers deem it basic good manners that the poet doesn't draw attention to the making of the poem. Yeats, as usual, put it best:

A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a mo ment's thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

My problem with Raymond

Carver is that what seems a moment's thought to the reader too frequently seemed a moment's thought to the writer also. Take, for instance, "Sunday Night", from the collection, A New Path to the Waterfall:

Make use of the things around you.

This light rain

Outside the window, for one.

This cigarette between my fingers,

These fret on the couch.

The faint sound of rock and roll,

The red Ferrari in my head.

The woman bumping

Drunkenly around in the kitchen.

Put it all in,

Make use.

What I find here is something that hasn't got the structure or shape or logic (why the jump from "you" to "I"?) or sense of imperative that most of us demand from a poem - I feel that it could just as easily run to eight lines or thirty seven lines rather than the eleven lines it takes up. I feel, in brief, that it's the kind of diary entry made by a writer in between periods of creativity and then chopped into lines and called a poem.

Much of Carver's verse strikes me in this way. There is a very distinctive voice at work throughout this collection, and there are poems in which the voice and the shape seem so perfectly in tune with each other that we couldn't imagine them as anything other than poems ("Bonnard's Nudes", "The Jungle", "The Scratch", "My Wife", "What the Doctor Said", for instance), but too often there's the sense of a prose writer doodling in a form that doesn't suit him.

That's because Carver's great poetic gift discovered its best expression in the short story, where his imagination found a shaped and a rhythm that was congenial to it. The truth of this can be seen by default in some of the longer narrative verses here, which immediately remind the reader off Robert Frost's narrative poems, and then of the gap that separates both writers.

In "The Death of the Hired Man", for instance, Frost is writing with all the structural sureness and metrical skill of the born poet and we're permitted to savour the individual lines at the same time as we're being led inexorably through the story; in Carver's "Lemonade", by contrast, which is devoid of metrical or rhythmic interest, the story is all we have, and it's not enough. Instead we think, That would have made a good short story.

In her introduction to this volume, Carver's widow Tess Gallagher tells us that poetry was "not something he wrote between stories. Rather, it was the spiritual current out of which he moved to write the short stories". But even that makes the poetry seem incidental to Carver's main impulse.

She also quotes Isak Dinesen's "without hope and without despair" as the "quiet banner of determination" that "flew over the last ten years of Raymond Carver's life". And yes, such absence of either hope or despair is integral to Carver's tone, but it's more poignantly and powerfully conveyed in the prose than in verse where the deliberately mundane tone can too often sound, well, mundane.

Ms Gallagher says, too, that "Ray's artlessness burned so fiercely it consumed all trace of process". I think I know what she means, but in the case of his poetry, surely it's his art that should have done that.