Well, to be honest, most posthumous collections are not very good to begin with. There are great poems here and there but, as collections, I find them weak. I did not even finish The People Look Like Flowers At Last... and that's the only B. book I have not read from A to Z. I was very busy at the time, and I thought that was the reason of leaving the book unfinished. But then I realized that I had read many B. books on busy times as well, and I couldn't put them down. So either I've grown up or the posthumous collections are below average.
Except that they changed (typoed?) clotted to dotted in "I Saw a Tramp Last Night."
The cover with the drawings is a bit of a quickie turd pile... It's just laziness and lack of giving a damn about this marginal little book of scrap poems.
BANZSI said:i bought an proof edition and i am an little bit disapointed.
Now that they have changed the cover, the proof will probably end up being more valuable than it otherwise would have.I'm sure that someone here will buy it if you are not happy with it.
...this marginal little book of scrap poems...
That's odd; City Lights doesn't even list it in their "Forthcoming Books" section.
Yeah; I edited that, but not before you copied it. But even so, it's fairly early. I should be able to find it at the local bookstore anyway.I think that he is talking about "The Continual Condition", from Ecco, not Christ W/ BBQ sauce, er, I mean Absence of the Hero by City Lights...
Copyright Booklist Publications Sep 15, 2009
Poetry The Continual Condition. By Charles Bukowski. Ed. by John Martin. Oct. 2009. I44p. Ecco, $25.99 (9780061771200). 811.
Poets don't come more sui generis than lumpen existentialist par excellence Bukowski (1920-94). So it's nice that Martin, whose Black Sparrow Press Buk's sales legendarily maintained, keeps finding more of the mangy master to publish. Nicer, the contents of even this eleventh collection of leavings is of a piece with the others. If anything, there is less sentimentality in it than in some previous posthumous volumes. These are poems about writing and drinking, the racetrack, women, and sniveling fans - a quite good one about one of those, who worries that bad stuff will no longer happen to the comfortable elderly Buk; Buk knows better. Damned if the longest ones aren't high among the best; for instance, the high-school epic episode "mountain of horror" and "heavy dogs in cement shoes," about suffering boring discussions of great "outsider writers" - Celine, Kerouac, and on down from there: Ginsberg, Mailer (Mailer!!? That's how Buk feels, too), Olson, Ferlinghetti, Poe, Saroyan . . . It's the same old roughneck intellectual rant - nonpareil entertainment. - Ray Olson