Review by New York Times Review
A hefty new volume collects Charles Bukowski's 'hard found music of the streets.' POETRY shouldn't tell us what we already know, though of course it can revive what we think we know. A durable poet, the rarest of all birds, has a unique point of view and the gift of language to express it. The unique point of view can often come from a mental or physical deformity. Deep within us, but also on the surface, is the wounded ugly boy who has never caught an acceptable angle of himself in the mirror. A poet can have a deep sense of himself as a Quasimodo in a world without bells, or as the fine poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote: A feast of brief hopes, a rally of the proud, A tournament of hunchbacks, literature. Charles Bukowski was a monstrously homely man because of a severe case of acne vulgaris when he was young. Along the way he also had bleeding ulcers, tuberculosis and cataracts; he attempted suicide; and only while suffering from leukemia in the last year of his life did he manage to quit drinking. Bukowski was a major-league tosspot, occasionally brutish but far less so than the mean-minded Hemingway, who drank himself into suicide. Both men created public masks for themselves, not a rare thing in a writer's paper sack of baubles, but the masks were held in place for so long that they could not be taken off except in the work. Throughout his life, Bukowski held a series of low-paying jobs so dismal that they are unbearable to list, though he did keep a position as a mail carrier for many years. Early on he was a library hound, and there are a surprising number of literary references in his work. (Quite by accident while I was writing this, the French critic Alexandre Thiltges paid a visit. He confirmed my suspicion that Bukowski had closely read Céline.) Even more surprising in this large collection are the number of poems characterized by fragility and delicacy; I've been reading Bukowski occasionally for 50 years and had not noted this before, which means I was most likely listening too closely to his critics. Our perceptions of Bukowski, like our perceptions of Kerouac, are muddied by the fact that many of his most ardent fans are nitwits who love him to the exclusion of any of his contemporaries. I would suggest you can appreciate Bukowski with the same brain that loves Wallace Stegner and Gary Snyder. It is uncomfortable to realize that I have been monitoring American poetry for 50 years and am now even a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which a friend refers to as "The Dead Man's Club." All the scaffolding around the five-story building of this poetry is actually a confusing blemish and should be ignored in favor of the building itself, but this is probably impossible until a date in the future far beyond our concern. Time constructs the true canon, not critics contemporaneous to the work, whether they are the Vendlerites of the Boston area, the Bloombadgers of New Haven or the Goodyear Tires of New York City. Bukowski was a solo act, though his lineage is fairly obvious. You detect Whitman, Bierce, Mencken, Sherwood Anderson, Kenneth Patchen, William Carlos Williams, perhaps Villon and Genet and strongly Céline. He loved classical music, and there is an amusing poem in which he feels for Bruckner because he wasn't a better composer. He despised Fitzgerald because to a man from the lower depths, Fitzgerald seemed sensitive only to the sufferings within the upper class. Bukowski seemed far more worried about his cats' health than his own. One had been shot and run over but survived, though its front legs didn't coordinate with the back, a metaphor of something, probably Bukowski's life. He had several failed marriages - but then historically, poets are better off with imaginary lovers. He observed birds, but one cannot imagine anyone less a nature poet, if you discount the infield of a racetrack, where you could see him in the long line at the $2 window. He was deeply enthused about bars and keeping company with whores, and seemed to like the spavined landscapes of the nether regions of Los Angeles, which I myself used to visit. They are so resolutely charmless compared with the slums of New York I knew in the late '50s, which I visited because I was advised not to. I have wondered, when asked about Bukowski in Brazil and France, if that's not why so many foreigners admire him: he's simply the American of their imagination, a low-level gangster as poet. Some are Abel poets and some are Cain poets, and Bukowski is clearly the latter (there are those who think of themselves as Cain poets but shift to Abel when they get a job in academia). It is clear in reading him that Bukowski didn't live in a gated community, whether academic or economic. His was the hard found music of the streets. But then, fuimus flumus - it all drifts away in smoke. It is not poetry that lasts but good poems, a critical difference. An attractive idea is that the test of poetry should be the same as Henry James's dictum for the novel, that it be interesting. Pasternak said that despite all appearances, it takes a lot of volume to fill a life. Bukowski's strength is in the sheer bulk of his contents, the virulent anecdotal sprawl, the melodic spleen without the fetor of the parlor or the classroom, as if he were writing while straddling a cement wall or sitting on a bar stool, the seat of which is made of thorns. He never made that disastrous poet's act of asking permission for his irascible voice. "The Pleasures of the Damned" is an appropriately long collection because it is likely to stand as the definitive volume of Bukowski's poems. It is well edited by John Martin, the publisher of the estimable Black Sparrow Press, who was Bukowski's editor for most of his working life. It is hard to quote Bukowski because there are virtually none of those short lyrics with bow ties of closure that are so pleasant for a reviewer to quote. I will excerpt a poem evidently written quite near the end of his life: it bothers the young most, I think: an unviolent slow death. still it makes any man dream; you wish for an old sailing ship, the white salt-crusted sail and the sea shaking out hints of immortality sea in the nose sea in the hair sea in the marrow, in the eyes and yes, there in the chest. will we miss the love of a woman or music or food or the gambol of the great mad muscled horse, kicking clods and destinies high and away in just one moment of the sun coming down? I am not inclined to make elaborate claims for Bukowski, because there is no one to compare him to, plus or minus. He wrote in the language of his class as surely as Wallace Stevens wrote in the language of his own. This book offers you a fair chance to make up your own mind on this quarrelsome monster. It is ironical that those who man the gates of the canon will rarely if ever make it inside themselves. Bukowski came in a secret back door. Jim Harrison's most recent novel is "Returning to Earth."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Martin, Bukowski's publisher for ages at Black Sparrow Press, has put the last previously uncollected poems into what is otherwise his selection of his most successful author's poems. It makes for a nice, long read that still takes only a couple of sittings because of Bukowski's predominant short line and perfected spieler's diction. Actually, it is less than twice as long as two of Bukowski's other collections, and many who love Buk a remarkably easy thing to do, despite and because of his roughneck brusqueness and general raffishness may opt to go through a couple of those again rather than this book. Martin's choice seems light on the barroom, lovers'-quarrel, and lunatic-encounter poems that show what a genius of a raconteur Buk was. Of course, that gift is also highlighted in his short stories; perhaps that's why there's a higher proportion of reflective poems here than one recalls in the previous collections. But quibble, quibble. We're lucky to have so much Bukowski to winnow, and for that, all thanks to Martin.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Bukowski's chatty free verse (and fiction) about disappointment, drunkenness, racetracks, flophouses, lust, sexual failure, poverty and late-life success amassed an enormous following by the time of his death at age 73 in 1994. Billed as the last book with new Bukowski poems in it, this hefty collection also culls from his prior books, and it is all of a piece: the warnings about lost potency, the ironic takes on ailments of mind and body, the comradeship with everyone down at the heels, down on his luck, or down to his last shot of booze. Bukowski's best poems have an exaggerated, B-movie black-and-white aura about them. One new poem warns "that/ nothing is wasted:/ either that/ or/ it all is." In another, "hell is only what we/ create,/ smoking these cigarettes,/ waiting here,/ wondering here." Near the front of the volume comes a page-and-a-half-long verse manifesto, "a poem is a city," that might describe what Bukowski could do: "a poem is a city filled with streets and sewers," it begins, "filled with saints, heroes, beggars, madmen... banality and booze," and yet "a poem is the world." (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
