Customer Reviews

In the Shadow of the Rose

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Charles Bukowski, In the Shadow of the Rose (Black Sparrow, 1991)

It only makes sense that if you're the world's most prolific and bestselling poet, two truisms will occur: first, that anything your publisher puts out in limited edition will cost a painful amount of money to procure, because it will sell out in pre-order, and the rest of the world will pay vast sums to get their grubby hands on it; second, that not all of your material is going to be of the highest quality. The biggest problems in a writer's career occur when these two events coincide.

Unfortunately, such is the case with Bukowski's limited edition In the Shadow of the Rose. Dedicated to actor/activist Sean Penn, the book has (not surprisingly) quite a bit to say, in general terms anyway, about some of Penn's pet projects (in the activism, not the acting, world), and as we all know by now, message poetry tends to be boring and ugly, with a vastly overinflated sense of its own self-importance. Many of the pieces to be found here fall into this category. (It should also be noted,with some amusement, that some of the pieces here are far longer than anything in the similarly-limited Beauti-Ful and Other Long Poems.) Sure, there are some places where the spark of Buk's well-documented brilliance shines through-- it even happens in the political poems a time or two. But for the price you're likely to pay for a copy these days, you can (and should) buy the whole corpus that's still available for cover price; much of it's a lot better than this.