The Pleasures of the Damned
Selected Poems 1951-1993
-
- $17.99
-
- $17.99
Publisher Description
THE BEST OF THE BEST OF BUKOWSKI
The Pleasures of the Damned is a selection of the best poetry from America's most iconic and imitated poet, Charles Bukowski. Celebrating the full range of the poet's extraordinary sensibility and his uncompromising linguistic brilliance, these poems cover a lifetime of experience, from his renegade early work to never-before-collected poems penned during the final days before his death.
Selected by John Martin, Bukowski's long-time editor and the publisher of the legendary Black Sparrow Press, this stands as what Martin calls 'the best of the best of Bukowski'.
The Pleasures of the Damned is an astonishing poetic treasure trove, essential reading for both long-time fans and those just discovering this unique and important American voice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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."
