Ford on Carver in New Yorker

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"Good Raymond" by Richard Ford sung to me tonight.  Not only do Carver and
Ford give me the best moments of clarity and insight in fiction since
Salinger, but at one point Ford describes a moment of Tess Gallagher
reading "Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg" 

"and as the last phrase sounded--'and her red hair lights the
wall'--feeling a moody silence come over us all, a slightly embarrassed
wordlessness about the fact that we were so frankly letting the poem _in_,
with all its blunt intimations of death and lust and boomtowns gone bust
and beautiful girls you never get to visit again.  It's a sentimental poem
and wonderful one from a wonderful and rather sentimental poet who never
got his due.  And it cariries strong feeling the way a hod carrier totes
bricks.  But we all subscribed to it."

still do, I suppose, will

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