The People Look Like Flowers at Last: New Poems

This poetry collection was a little spottier than other books like, say, "Open All Night" - but the fact that this is one of several posthumous publications of Bukowski's work, it is remarkable that there are as many gems as there are in this book. If you're interested in his racetrack poems or his poems about other writers, this book has some great ones. It's a bit lacking in those striking poems about the death of one of his former wives, which were always surprisingly vulnerable for such an already candid poet. I would recommend this book to any Bukowski fan - it's a bit rough as a 100% first-Bukowski read - but weak Bukowski is still excellent poetry.

Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last (Ecco, 2007) Being a Charles Bukowski fan since his death in 1994 has, for the most part, been an exercise in treading water. He left a phenomenal body of work to be published posthumously, but let's face it, he published most of the good stuff before he died. Way before, some would say. But The People Look Like Flowers at Last is the first book of poetry (The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship, a book of prose, is remarkable) since Bukowski's death where some of the poems really resound. Like Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame resound. Sure, in a book of three hundred pages, not all of them do, but some of this is Buk's best work since the early seventies. And all this time it was sitting in a drawer... "I suppose like other I have come through fire and sword, love gone wrong, head-on crashes, drunk at sea, and I have listened to the simple sound of water running in tube and wished to drown but simply couldn't bear the others carrying my body down three flights of stairs to the round mouths of curious biddies..." ("it is not much") So many of Bukowski's poems from the past forty years have been observational and nothing else. Astute, well-worded observations, of course, but no sense of closure, nothing other than stories that seem to be told and then sit there without asking the reader to think more. I'm not denigrating this type of poem (at least not when Bukowski writes it), but every once in a while he pops up with a poem in a more traditional structure, something that says "hey, you know, I've been thinking about..." and blasting the reader with fantastic images that are actually anchored to something. The majority of Burning in Water... is like that, and it's the last book with a clear majority of such poems. In the posthumous work, I thought they'd all died out, but such is not the case. It's not a majority, but there are enough here to keep the reader hungry for the next posthumous work. My favorite Buk in quite a while. *** ½

Read it front to back, back to front, or dip in and step out at your leisure. I keep it close at hand for a Bukowski fix and it always does me right.

For me this is one of the best books of prose or poetry I have read. I ear marked several. This is a now one of my favorite books.

Sad to say, this book exhausts the remainder of Buk's poetry. The work is not as strong as earlier books, not as pointed. But as he would have understood, all ends. So what else is new? There are some strong poems: a eulogy, "legs"("she was a great woman/with great legs/but she found life too hard/she died 34 years ago and/I haven't seen/legs like that/since/and I have never stopped/looking"); one on fame and its burdens "I never bring my wife"("I would like to be human/if only they would let me"). You hear the weariness, Some shots come through, "he has a face women would love:utterly bland and blank/untouched by circumstance.") He tells us, "while most people converse away/I write it all down." We are better for it.