The Pleasures of the Damned: Poems, 1951-1993 [Paperback]

Charles Bukowski (Author)

Book Description

Release date: December 2, 2008

To his legions of fans, Charles Bukowski was—and remains—the quintessential counterculture icon. A hard-drinking wild man of literature and a stubborn outsider to the poetry world, he wrote unflinchingly about booze, work, and women, in raw, street-tough poems whose truth has struck a chord with generations of readers.

Edited by John Martin, the legendary publisher of Black Sparrow Press and a close friend of Bukowski's, The Pleasures of the Damned is a selection of the best works from Bukowski's long poetic career, including the last of his never-before-collected poems. Celebrating the full range of the poet's extra-ordinary and surprising sensibility, and his uncompromising linguistic brilliance, these poems cover a rich lifetime of experiences and speak to Bukowski's "immense intelligence, the caring heart that saw through the sham of our pretenses and had pity on our human condition" (The New York Quarterly). The Pleasures of the Damned is an astonishing poetic treasure trove, essential reading for both longtime fans and those just discovering this unique and legendary American voice.

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.

Review

“This long and well-edited collection is likely to stand as the definitive volume of Bukowski’s poems.” (New York Times Book Review )

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Product Details

• Paperback: 576 pages
• Publisher: Ecco (December 2, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061228443
• ISBN-13: 978-0061228445
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.2 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #111,901 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).

Amazon Author Rankbeta 

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#17 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Classics

#67 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Contemporary

#80 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary

#17 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Classics

#67 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Contemporary

#80 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

58 of 62 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing September 21, 2008

By Zachary T. Ciulla

Format: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.

28 of 29 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 TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

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.

33 of 37 people found the following review helpful

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

By kevin griffith

Format: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.