The Pleasures of the Damned: Poems, 1951-1993 (Paperback)

by Charles Bukowski (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred 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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Bill Press

Even though he was preoccupied with his own death, Charles Bukowski worried about one thing even more: "of course, I may die in the next ten minutes/ and I'm ready for that/ but what I'm really worried about is/ that my editor-publisher might retire/ even though he is ten years younger than/ I."

Bukowski needn't have worried. John Martin not only outlived him, he's still at it: hunting down uncollected poems, editing Bukowski, and turning out yet new volumes of one of America's most-published poets. After convincing Bukowski to quit the post office and write for a living, Martin and his Black Sparrow Press became the poet's sole publisher. Since closing Black Sparrow in 2002, Martin has produced for Ecco five collections of poems that Bukowski set aside to be published posthumously. For this sixth and last volume, he reviewed all 2,618 poems in the 21 Bukowski books that Ecco now has in print and selected 273 of what he told me were "the best of the best of Bukowski," including 20 poems never before collected.

In a very real sense, then, The Pleasures of the Damned is as much about John Martin as it is about Charles Bukowski. It's an insightful walk through the work of a poet by the man who knew him best, and it reveals Bukowski in the many, often conflicting dimensions that make him such a popular, accessible, and, yes, great artist. Others might write for the high-brow, Bukowski writes for the crowd. Others see poetry in a flower or symphony, Bukowski sees poetry in whores standing on a street corner, a man mowing his lawn or boxcars sitting in a railroad yard. For him, as for Walt Whitman, poetry is everyday life: "a poem is a city, a poem is a nation,/ a poem is the world. . . ."

This extraordinary collection establishes Bukowski as much more than just another West Coast Beat poet. At last, maybe fans like me won't have to apologize for ranking him among the best.

There are many sides to Bukowski, and here they are all on full display. He's at once cynical about humankind, yet full of hope. His language can be uncomfortably crude, yet movingly lyrical. He shocks you on one page and moves you on the next. Nowhere is he more seemingly contradictory than in his complex relationships with women. Just when you think he sees women as nothing but a collection of body parts, he unveils an amazing tenderness. After his graphic description of showering with his wife, Linda, for example -- "I turn her, kiss her,/ soap up the breasts, get them and the belly, the neck,/ the fronts of the legs, the ankles, the feet,/ and then the . . . " -- he suddenly admits his fear of losing her: "Linda, you brought it to me/ when you take it away/ do it slowly and easily/ make it as if I were dying in my sleep instead of in/ my life, amen."

Indeed, the impression of Bukowski from this collection is that of a crude, hard-living, hard-drinking, hard-fighting curmudgeon who is, at the same time, a closet romantic. In "The Bluebird," perhaps the most beautiful and revealing of all his poems, Bukowski hints that his rough exterior, first mounted as a protective shield against an abusive father, is just a smokescreen to mask the vulnerable soul lurking inside: "there's a bluebird in my heart that/ wants to get out/ but I'm too tough for him."

What's surprising about The Pleasures of the Damned is that, while Bukowski died of leukemia in 1994, many poems in this collection read as though they were expressly written for today. He has great faith in democracy, but no patience with those who complain about the political process: "fellow citizens/ the problem never was the Democratic/ System, the problem is// you." He skewers politicians who preach one thing but practice just the opposite: "AND The Best at Hate Are Those/ Who Preach LOVE/ AND THE BEST AT WAR/ -- FINALLY -- ARE THOSE WHO/ PREACH/ PEACE." And he recognizes the futility of war after war: "but the young wised up first/ and now the old are getting wise,/ almost everybody's anti-war,/ no use having a war you can't win,/ right or wrong."

Bukowski had little faith in his contemporaries. The older generation he dismissed as "the raving, the battered, the blind and the sadly corrupt." It's in the young that he placed his hope, and it's for them he saved some of his most powerful advice: "invent yourself and then reinvent yourself/ change your tone and shape so often that they can/ never/ categorize you." In some fashion, we must all survive the test that sums up Bukowski's remarkable life: "what matters most is/ how well you/ walk through the/ fire."

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 576 pages
• Publisher: Ecco (December 2, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061228443
• ISBN-13: 978-0061228445
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #43,248 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #20 in

  Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( B ) > Bukowski, Charles

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Well Worth a Read, November 14, 2007

By	kevin griffith (Columbus, OH United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Pleasures of the Damned: Poems, 1951-1993 (Hardcover)

Although I own almost every book Buk has written, I thoroughly enjoyed this collection, expertly edited by John Martin. Martin has selected some of Buk's most provocative and surreal work and arranged it so that it still sounds fresh and vital, even to the most devoted fan. My appreciation for Bukowski's work had dwindled somewhat after the incessant posthumous collections, but Martin gives this prolific writer what he really needed lately: a good editing. Thanks.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, September 21, 2008

By	Zachary T. Ciulla (San Marcos, TX) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Pleasures of the Damned: Poems, 1951-1993 (Hardcover)

For a guy who's published as many books of poetry as Bukowski has, a large book of selected poems sounds like an excellent idea: a "greatest hits" type collection for casual fans to buy; a single place to get all his best poems. And this book could have been that, save the editing. First of all, over half of the poems selected were published after Bukowski died. They obviously were not what he considered to be his strongest works, they were leftovers. I understand that he had a lot of good leftover poems, but this book really overdoes it. The worst of these poems are the leftover leftovers, poems making their debut in this book (published in 2007). What the hell are poems like that doing in a collection that's supposed to represent his most accomplished and proven work? Secondly, there's absolutely no discernible pattern to the way these poems are arranged. No dates are given, and no attempt at chronology has been made, as if to imply that Bukowski's writing never had any kind of evolution over time. If you research the poems, you can actually spot places where this book jumps multiple decades just from one poem to the next, which makes it awkward to try to read it in order. And even if you don't care about author's intent or dates or sequence, and you just want a good book of poems, I think this book still fails. There are a lot of weak poems in this book, and I think the editor took advantage of the fact that he had complete free range of probably almost every poem Bukowski ever wrote and used it to try to redefine Bukowski as a different type of poet than he was reputed as during his life. And for what purpose, just because he could? This is the same guy who's been reading Bukowski's poems for years, he was probably sick of the old ones and more excited about the posthumous poems he discovered and published in recent years. New readers of Bukowski, tempted by the "selected poems" label, will be unfairly subjected to his personal bias. That isn't to say that there aren't good poems in this book, it just could have been a lot better.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "I Have Been Alone But Seldom Lonely" , December 20, 2007

By	H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Pleasures of the Damned: Poems, 1951-1993 (Hardcover)

THE PLEASURES OF THE DAMNED is a collection of Charles Bukowski's poems, 548 pages of them, many of them from earlier volumes of poetry, some of them never before published. For anyone familiar with Bukowski, there are few if any surprises here, rather a healthy sampling of this iconoclast's poetry. So very autobiographical, many of these poems are about the things Bukowski loved: the races, cats (you can learn from them), booze, poetry (he calls himself a poetry junkie), Wagner, sex (like Mahler, you do not rush it), some women. He can write a paean to a lover in "The Shower" but then say in another poem that American women, as opposed to Japanese women, "will kill you like they tear a lampshade." He is not reticent in writing about people and things he hates as well: some writers, especially Hemingway, whom he describes as "just a drunk"-- the irony is that in "a clean, well-lighted place," his description of Hemingway's use of his literary reputation to reel women in "one at a time" sounds like Bukowski himself-- critics, mindless work. (He pictures workers trapped in jobs that go nowhere as having "goldfish security.)

Nothing was immune from Bukowski's pen. Apparently he could write about any subject. There are poems here on the killing of elephants in Vietnam, a grammar school bully remembered, the ignorance of youth, a trip to the doctor, picturing himself in a nursing home, a conversation with death, an old car ("a poor man's miracle"), the abuse that both he and his mother suffered at the hands of his father (his mother had "the saddest smile I ever knew"), the homeless, the old, poor, sick and dying, throwing a radio out a window, etc., etc.

No one would say that Bukowski wrote "pretty" poems. On the other hand, we cannot deny that many of them go straight to the bone. In "eating my senior citizen's dinner at the Sizzler" (what a horrendous image) markers in modern cemeteries are "flat on the ground, it's much more pleasant for passing traffic." His world is inhabited by a sixty-five-year-old man with cancer who kills his sixty-six-year-old wife who has Alzheimer's and then kills himself and a house that is sad because it is inhabited with people who have mindless, dead-end jobs. For many of the people Bukowski writes about, "it's a lonely world/of frightened people,/just as it has always/been." On the other hand, in the poem entitled "mind and heart" (p. 523), he acknowledges that we are all alone, "forever alone" but goes on to say that "I have been alone but seldom lonely."

Reading Bukowski reminds you of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg--although he certainly is not derivative of any other writer-- but a case can be made that he is a lot closer in his mood and world view to some of the darker poems of both Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson than he probably would have acknowledged. There is a place in the parade of poets for anyone who speaks the truth: the Robert Frosts, the Emily Dickinsons, the Donald Halls, the Edwin Arlington Robinsons along with the Charles Bukowskis.