The subject of Raymond Carver’s Happiness is the early-morning sighting of a paperboy and his friend. Photograph: Corbis Bridge/Alamy
The only off-putting thing about this anthology is its title. I object to it on the same grounds that I did the now-defunct motorway restaurant, Happy Eater: it is a mistake to boast in advance. But the difference between it and Happy Eater is that it does ensure that its readers will be happy – even if it can't guarantee that every one will be a winner. Once you have got past the image of a diver on the cover, stuck in midair in honour of the Olympics, you can start to enjoy what is a first‑rate collection. It is an anthology to rejoice in, partly because there is not a single unwelcoming poem here and only a handful of unworthy ones. But the greatest fascination of the book is to have so many poems trying to make one feel better about being alive.
Does happiness write white? Raymond Carver's poem has a transparency that goes beyond whiteness. He addresses his subject in a clear snapshot of early morning – a sighting of a paperboy and his friend. He looks through pedestrian inconsequence to the everyday sublime. And he knows happiness prefers not to be examined too closely. The ending is beautiful, a conversational signing-off.
We want poetry to move us and poems about life going wrong tend to be literature's winners, with a clear lead over any more optimistic teams. But this collection is determined to remind us of positive poems to be cherished. Sebastian Faulks, in his foreword, observes that these poems reflect the "glorious futility" of living. I am not sure that I agree. More often, there is no sense of futility. They are filled with a sense of purpose, divine and otherwise. The inspiring messages could not be more varied. There are enough poetic spurs here (My Brilliant Image by Hafiz; An Epilogue by John Masefield; The End by Robert Herrick) to stir the most committed slacker.
Having said that, not all of them would help anyone in an Olympic moment. Happy the Man, by John Dryden/Horace, plays safe by harvesting the consolation of past joys and fate-proof delights: "Not Heaven itself upon the past has power/ But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour." Yet good – and great – poetry turns out to be the best self-help available. As I read, I began thinking about why these poems, aside from the obvious matter of language, are so superior to self-help literature. It is, I concluded, to do with their nuanced take on comfort. Instead of thin, relentlessly one-dimensional "positive thinking", these poems tend to acknowledge the negative, knows there must be a reckoning between dark and light. TS Eliot's incomparable Little Gidding reminds us that birth and death are allied: "We die with the dying/ See they depart, and we go with them/We are born with the dead/ See, they return and bring us with them."
Inevitably, there is a handful of sterling warhorses here, too, such as Arthur Hugh Clough's Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth (you want to throw yourself into the rhetorical emphasis of its last line: "But westward, look, the land is bright"), and William Ernest Henley's Invictus (Nelson Mandela's favourite) which, though triumphantly second rate, is satisfying to commit to memory. And I was delighted to encounter for the first time Robert Frost's marvellous Riders, about life as a headless horse but ending with the witty hope – drily expressed: "We have ideas yet that we haven't tried." And Anon is in good form with three lines translated from German: "What I spent I had/ What I saved I lost/ What I gave I have." That was all there was to it: a pocket sermon.
So early it's still almost dark out.Does happiness write white? Raymond Carver's poem has a transparency that goes beyond whiteness. He addresses his subject in a clear snapshot of early morning – a sighting of a paperboy and his friend. He looks through pedestrian inconsequence to the everyday sublime. And he knows happiness prefers not to be examined too closely. The ending is beautiful, a conversational signing-off.We want poetry to move us and poems about life going wrong tend to be literature's winners, with a clear lead over any more optimistic teams. But this collection is determined to remind us of positive poems to be cherished. Sebastian Faulks, in his foreword, observes that these poems reflect the "glorious futility" of living. I am not sure that I agree. More often, there is no sense of futility. They are filled with a sense of purpose, divine and otherwise. The inspiring messages could not be more varied. There are enough poetic spurs here (My Brilliant Image by Hafiz; An Epilogue by John Masefield; The End by Robert Herrick) to stir the most committed slacker.
Having said that, not all of them would help anyone in an Olympic moment. Happy the Man, by John Dryden/Horace, plays safe by harvesting the consolation of past joys and fate-proof delights: "Not Heaven itself upon the past has power/ But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour." Yet good – and great – poetry turns out to be the best self-help available. As I read, I began thinking about why these poems, aside from the obvious matter of language, are so superior to self-help literature. It is, I concluded, to do with their nuanced take on comfort. Instead of thin, relentlessly one-dimensional "positive thinking", these poems tend to acknowledge the negative, knows there must be a reckoning between dark and light. TS Eliot's incomparable Little Gidding reminds us that birth and death are allied: "We die with the dying/ See they depart, and we go with them/We are born with the dead/ See, they return and bring us with them."
Inevitably, there is a handful of sterling warhorses here, too, such as Arthur Hugh Clough's Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth (you want to throw yourself into the rhetorical emphasis of its last line: "But westward, look, the land is bright"), and William Ernest Henley's Invictus (Nelson Mandela's favourite) which, though triumphantly second rate, is satisfying to commit to memory. And I was delighted to encounter for the first time Robert Frost's marvellous Riders, about life as a headless horse but ending with the witty hope – drily expressed: "We have ideas yet that we haven't tried." And Anon is in good form with three lines translated from German: "What I spent I had/ What I saved I lost/ What I gave I have." That was all there was to it: a pocket sermon.
Happiness, by Raymond Carver
I'm near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.
When I see the boy and his friend
walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.
They wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.
They are so happy
they aren't saying anything, these boys.
I think if they could, they would take
each other's arm.
It's early in the morning,
and they are doing this thing together.
They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale over the water.
Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn't enter into this.
Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.
Extracted from All of Us: The Collected Poems by Raymond Carver. Published by Harvill Press, 2003. Copyright © Tess Gallagher, 1996.
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