Slouching Toward Nirvana: New Poems [Hardcover]

Charles Bukowski (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 18, 2005

in this place

there are the dead, the deadly and the dying.

there is the cross, the builders of the cross and the burners of the

cross.

the pattern of my life forms like a cheap shadow

on the wall before me.

my love

what is left of it

now must crawl

to wherever it can crawl.

the strongest know that death is

final

and the happiest are those gifted with the

shortest journey.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Bukowski's posthumous productivity continues, this time giving us one of his best collections, thanks for which are perhaps due to the editorial labors of John Martin, who closed down his long-running Black Sparrow Press a few years back but maintained his interest in his meat-and-potatoes author. Like many another Buk collection, this one comes in four parts. To see just how good it is, turn to part 2, indicatively introduced by these lines: "There's a lioness / down the hallway // put on your lion's mask / and wait." The section's theme is women: Buk's women, lioness-like, indeed. Approach with caution or, better, as he says, wait. Beauty or, like Buk, beast, each is as sexy, feisty, crude, and smart (sometimes) as he is. These seemingly artless (you try to write anything good in Bukowski's dribble-down-the-page free style) rants, matched here in force and humor by the ones not about women, are the poetic analogs of the man-woman stuff in the pages of tough-guy novelists from Spillane and Thompson^B to Leonard. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

Charles Bukowski is one of America's best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose, and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in Andernach, Germany, and raised in Los Angeles, where he lived for fifty years. He published his first story in 1944, when he was twenty-four, and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Ecco; 1 edition (January 18, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060577037
• ISBN-13: 978-0060577032
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,311,481 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Charles Bukowski is one of America's best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose, and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in Andernach, Germany, and raised in Los Angeles, where he lived for fifty years. He published his first story in 1944, when he was twenty-four, and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp (1994).

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome collection, March 5, 2005

By 

Albert Rosen "audiotube" (el paso) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Slouching Toward Nirvana: New Poems (Hardcover)

I keep coming back to Buk after intervals - this collection is packed with gems - scathing attacks on humanity and its parade of fools. Lonely, introspective poems that reveal the vast emptiness of the universe and the soul. I have a few volumes of Buk's stuff and can't afford to buy them all but when I flipped through the pages of Slouching ... I had to have it. You will not be disappointed if you are a fan of poems by Trakl, Rilke, Holderlin etc... Bukowski is one of the giants.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Slouching Toward Greatness, October 4, 2005

By 

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

This review is from: Slouching Toward Nirvana: New Poems (Hardcover)

This latest volume of Charles Bukowski's poetry was published posthumously and edited by John Martin. Almost all the poems are highly personal and often told through the voice of a first person narrator who is obviously Bukowski himself. He is nothing if not opinionated. He listens to Sibelius, Wagner and Brahms, reads Auden, Dostoevsky and Hamsun, does not care for visitors, ("sometimes I simply ask them to leave/and they do") abhors poetry readings and signings ("this is the ultimate sellout, Jack.") as well as most academic poets or academics of any kind. He doesn't care for Hemingway, ("he knew that what he was/killing was already/dead.") likes his cats, ("I think cats are better than we are") alcohol and women-- although he admits that he is not always successful in his affairs-- and detests reviewers, describing them as "a dink moralist, a failed young writer or most likely just nothing at all." (I suppose I know what he would have to say about nothing Amazon reviewers.) He thinks about death but isn't obsesssed by it. ("death doesn't always come running.") After all, he is now past 70 and has beat the odds of not living a long life ("because Death after all these years/walks around in the room with me now and speaks softly"). He doesn't want a eulogy when he departs this world. "it would be nice/if one of my x-ladies was there/wearing too much makeup. . . and a tight green dress. . ." He is crazy about horse races, spends a lot of time and money attending them, and hates most movies, particularly those that win awards. ("Academy Award?", page 86.)

Two or three character sketches of Richard Corey types are included here-- a Harry Keel person, "admired and feared" in school who years later turns up as a down-and-out salesman and Dale Thorpe ("golden boy"), envied from afar in high school but who has since disappeared-- and a moving poem about a kid who, after the bullies beat him up daily at school, must endure the wrath of his mother because his clothes are ruined ("clothes cost money").

As do all good poets, Mr. Bukowski achieves much with little-- often with biting humor: "is what's good for the goose sometimes only good for the/goose?" he asks. And he beautifully contrasts youth and old age in "beach boys."

I watch the young boys on their surfboards
slim strong bodies gliding

some of them will end up in the madhouse
some of them will gain 80 pounds
some of them will commit suicide
most of them will eventually stop coming to the
beach.

The poet, who says we are all "museums of fear," eloquently describes his feelings in "with his awful teeth," describing "this dog Sadness," who is a "persistent mongrel."

There are literally dozens of similar passages in this collection that you will return to again and again.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Can't Beat the Buk, June 28, 2008

By 

A. Johnson "Jason Hex" (Torrance, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Slouching Toward Nirvana: New Poems (Paperback)

For a guy who's been dead since 1994, Charles Bukowski is an amazingly prolific sort. This is the 13th posthumous work to come from the Buk since his death and it's subtitled "new poems."

The Buk never claimed to be the best person, the best lover, the best writer, the best anything; although I'm sure that at different times and with plenty of beer in him he put forward some extravagant claims of other kinds. I love him, and many, many regular people who feel similarly do so because, I think, he was honest, unsentimental and a great lover of humanity in his poems--even when he is castigating humanity for its ugliness. It's precisely this breadth, which I would call Whitmanesque in its strange multiplicity, that continues to amaze.

These are far from his best poems, but there are some gems in here. Bukowski was the kind of poet of which there were and are few to none--a populist who wanted to be left alone, a lonely man who wasn't alone, a craftsman of the finest stamp, somebody who, like Hemingway, got the true words down on paper and knew how to leave it there. There are poems here about the usual Buk concerns: Women, drinking, the track, love, impending death, other writers, fame, bars, working horrible jobs, starving, starving, drinking and writing in boardinghouses; his close and unforgiving (yet deeply sympathetic) portraits of other people trying to push the dharma wheel a few inches forward, usually failing.

I won't attempt to do any lit crit pronouncements on this book. It's something to read alone and laugh with, to read openly with other people, to cherish, to keep the fire alive. There's an existential commitment to meaning here, the meaning one places on one's own actions, decisions, follies, joys, tears, life and death. We were fortunate to have him and now fortunate to have all these volumes to keep us warm.