Noob question (1 Viewer)

So I'm relatively new to Bukowski I only discovered him in October and as of last week I've read all his novels. I won't bother describing how much I loved them because I'm sure you all know the feeling. Anyway I really want to start getting into his poetry but don't want to end up buying 60 books, so what I'm wondering is if there aren't like a couple big ass volumes of his stuff I can get? I'd much prefer that instead of obsessively checking online and the bookstore to get the next poetry collection.

If any of you know about that I'd much appreciate it.
 
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it's an overview of his entire career.
 
pleasures of the damned is a great place to start - if you're looking for a single volume from some point in his career, you'll get different suggestions from everyone... mine would be either 'war all the time' or 'last night of the earth poems.'
 
The only bad thing about "Pleasures Of The Damned", is the fact that over 60% of the poems are from the posthumous poetry collections, and some of those poems seems to have been edited or changed for the worse by somebody else than Bukowski. Other than that, it's a great book and it contains over 20 previously unpublished poems.
 
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The first piece of Bukowski I got my hands on, by recomendation from a friend, was "Sifting through the madness, for the word, the line, the way", it completely blew me away and as they say, the rest is history.
 
I really want to start getting into his poetry

to me there's nothing better than just buying a regular book and getting into it intimately, rather than trying to gobble up his whole career at once. "the night torn mad with footsteps" from ecco is a good starting point imo. it's mature, lots of stuff about courage and camaraderie and sadness and of course the poems about how bad of shape the world is in any more. "you get so alone" from black sparrow is a beautiful book too. idk man i think you'll want em all eventually so just start the collection and get more when the time is right.
 
You really can't go wrong with any Buk poetry book. I picked out Sifting Through the Madness from the shelf because the title appealed to me. From then on, I picked up just about any Buk book I saw and waited for new ones to come out.
 

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