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BOOKS & THE CULTURE. That Kind of Marriage He slept upstairs. She slept downstairs. It was that kind of marriage. There are photos of the courtship: he, dressed to the nines she, a dark-eyed beauty hands touching by a top-down roadster. But by the child’s time, family love came down in two distinct beams. A Father’s Discovery It’s not as if at some point you finish like the craftsman who steps back to view his work: “So, ifs done Who’s to say when you finish? Maybe never. Or, at the earliest, much much later when the roles reverse. Perhaps ifs over long before you know: pieces in place trajectory set. On Raymond Carver, Poetry, and Inspiration That sonofabitch. He might have left a few unwritten. That one about rivers. That’s how I feel about rivers. \(Okay he put some images in there I And the one about him and a woman out in the wildtwenty miles from any town. Well we were more than twenty and it was wild and I had that one in mind too. What the hell’s left? I might as well go back to peddling plywood. John Sangster JOHN SANGSTER LIVES ON LOPEZ ISLAND, Washington. He writes for Acoustic Guitar and Strings magazines, and has published poems and essays in Prune Alley, TAPJoE, and The Christian Science Monitor. I admire the humor and directness of John Sangster’s poems. Their stark syntax and potent distillations feel refreshing in this talky-talk world. The late Raymond Carver \(who also lived in stones of the second half of the twentieth century. I imagine even Carver could have had a good laugh from Sangster’s reference. Naomi Shihab Nye 18 DECEMBER 8, 1995