Ultramarine by Raymond Carver (Random House: $13.95; 114 pp.)

Raymond Carver is best known to most readers as the author of three superb collections of short stories: “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” and most recently, “Cathedral.” Yet many West Coast readers know something about Raymond Carver that many Eastern readers have only recently discovered--that, for the whole of his writing career, Carver has been a highly respected and widely published poet as well as a distinguished writer of fiction.

Though he’d published several limited edition books of his poetry, it was last year’s major collection, “Where Water Comes Together With Other Water,” that brought a wider recognition of Carver’s work as a poet. His new volume, “Ultramarine,” demonstrates the same precise craftsmanship and deep humanity that his many fans have come to admire.

Not surprisingly, the impulses in the great majority of Carver’s poems are often narrative and anecdotal; he is, after all, a consummate storyteller. What we find in “Ultramarine” are aspects of narrative and voices lifted delicately (and intact) from the human pageant Carver so loves.

As in his prose style, understatement is the hallmark of Carver’s poetry. There is a directness and conversational ease that recall William Stafford’s best work. Although many of the poems display Carver’s love of the natural world, his best poems touch upon the constancy of human pain and human courage.

At times, baldly autobiographical and, at times, allowing his figures to speak for him, Carver champions the resilience and perseverance of people; his characters are sometimes broken-down and broken-hearted, but they are rarely broken in spirit. In this way, like Philip Levine, Carver chooses to give his words to those who otherwise would have no one to speak for them.

Each of Carver’s poems has a powerful meditative center. Scenes are sometimes violated by past scenes, memories that flood the poem until the speaker is forced to some new reckoning with his situation or his past. Recalling a childhood breakfast and his parents arguing, Carver thinks of his now dead father and says, “We’re both far away/ from there, and still someone’s crying. Even then/ I was beginning to understand how it’s possible/ to be in one place. And someplace else, too.”

In another of his most moving poems, “Limits,” Carver considers the live goose used by a farmer to lure the other geese toward his shotgun. In exchange, the live goose is provided with a plush, if captive, life. It was then, the poet says, he “Came to understand/ one can get used to anything,/ and become a stranger to nothing./ Saw that betrayal is just another word/ for loss, for hunger.”

“Ultramarine” is filled with many of the richest and most powerful poems Carver has written. They are poems of great eloquence and passion; this is a highly companionable and sonorous volume of poetry. As he says in his marvelous poem, “Mesopotamia,”: “So much that is mysterious and important/ is happening out there this morning.” And much of it is happening in Carver’s compelling new book of poems.