Septuagenarian Stew

HE WAS never a very good suicide. 'I gave it a go now and then but something always used to go wrong.' As we stand on the brink of war and global recession, what better than to trash the poll tax demand, order a hat trick of tequilas and settle down with an uplifting collection from Bukowski? These poems and prose are so clean and sparse one almost wants to rummage through Bukowski's bin for all the adjectives and adverbs. They are cut-throat tales of the back alleys of America, ergo the West, of a world more dire than that of Ivan Denisovich. Of course, Bukowski always has a companion, wherever he walks there is always another, wrapped in brown mantle, beside him. But it's only a chemical. It produces a kind of gin-soaked doggerel that is surely the perfect form to describe sleeping on park benches, working the assembly lines, and pensioners with a dollar to their name who pull triggers to alleviate terminal disease. Tragic humour is strewn liberally. In one poem, the Barfly who thanks to Mickey Rourke now drives a BMW, muses on suffering for art as he fingers his Gold Card. He writes of how the critics prefer the poems about him freezing and starving on cheap wine. With his easy transition into post-Hollywood prosperity he has shown himself to be not just another angry young man although his 'difficulties with women' as the press release puts it, show him to be no less misogynistic. But luckily, the years of body-abuse have not affected the clarity of his vision. It is of a people for whom the word 'change' means distraction, for whom thinking is painful. They move in circles of hopelessness. This sometimes infects his words with the sour, if inevitable, tang of decadence. But then, as he himself demonstrates in his poem Nowhere, most English-language authors are writing dross. With so little competition, he can only soar. (from 1990 and by the author of "The Dream of the Decade - The London Novels")

This is my second favorite volume of Bukowski. I know this because it has the second greatest number of pages dog-eared over so I can find them again. Why do I like it? OK, it is because when I read most modern stuff, or watch modern films for that matter, I wonder what planet they are living on. It is seldom anything I recognise. When I read Bukowski, either the poems or the short stories or the novels, I recognise the real world. It is just so damn refreshing to see that there is someone being published that is not totally disconnected with reality- at least working class reality. Will you like this book? Well, skip to page 282 and read "the masses." If you don't like it, then you ain't going to like the rest.... There is another reason that I like this book. It emphacises that the old horseplayer beat the odds and actually made it into his seventies. He "Buk'd" some steep odds there....

In the previous review I was telling that this book was published in spanish but ONLY the stories, not the poems. I can't understand why the guys at Anagrama did this. I cant understand why none of Bukowski poetry books are published in spanish either. And I say that this book is good, not Buk best, but good. (you'll wonder why 5 stars then? Because the good books deserve 10 or more stars)

In this collection, more than others, I think, he writes alot about the process of writing, about how his life has changed since he became a professional writer, and of course he beats up on the "writing" community, and he has some of the most inspiring (seriously) pieces about contemporary literature around. The Rape of The Holy Mother is like a manifesto for the new poet. He's got that same humour and touching bite that he always does, and its a good fat book, perfect for the bathroom, as stall literature.

listen to the wisdom of a septuagenarian poet! honest to the bone...tragic, funny, searching to find a space in this absurdity we call life...and death. after almost 40 years of writing poetry, and surviving it, buk closes out his career with this collection of gems.