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What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

List Price: $17.00
Your Price: $11.56
Product Info Reviews

<< 1 2 >>

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: ..."it has kept the rope from my throat....
Review: ...maybe it will loosen yours." Says Buk in 'Me and Faulkner.' It is about listening to great music. I heartily concur.

Charles Bukowski has only recently captured my attention, but I'm thinking he and I will become fast friends. It was because one of my well-read intellectual friends that I was even exposed to the man's work. He compared him to me--called me "Bukowskian" and I was ready to fight him to uphold my dignity. What? You mean, its a good thing...?

I evidently have a lot to catch up on this real man writing what really happens in life...like for driving in LA's heavy traffic and dealing with the road rage says he's "so polite, I'd make a nun puke." And venting his anger when he's accused one of his women of stealing his work, it's "next time take my left arm or a fifty/but not my poems..."

His life and his style is right down this po' boy's alley. I have been converted and I will read more of his body of works. This last piece here is one that I am now still reading and savoring like the finest of wine...though Buk may have found great irony in that.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: ..."it has kept the rope from my throat....
Review: ...maybe it will loosen yours." Says Buk in 'Me and Faulkner.' It is about listening to great music. I heartily concur.

Charles Bukowski has only recently captured my attention, but I'm thinking he and I will become fast friends. It was because one of my well-read intellectual friends that I was even exposed to the man's work. He compared him to me--called me "Bukowskian" and I was ready to fight him to uphold my dignity. What? You mean, its a good thing...?

I evidently have a lot to catch up on this real man writing what really happens in life...like for driving in LA's heavy traffic and dealing with the road rage says he's "so polite, I'd make a nun puke." And venting his anger when he's accused one of his women of stealing his work, it's "next time take my left arm or a fifty/but not my poems..."

His life and his style is right down this po' boy's alley. I have been converted and I will read more of his body of works. This last piece here is one that I am now still reading and savoring like the finest of wine...though Buk may have found great irony in that.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Hit-and-miss and keep on drivin'!
Review: Good old Hank: they keep on coming and even if the new ones are increasingly a hit-and-miss affair it's still worth ploughing through. Just when you almost nod off a thought, a paradox, an acerbic aside jolts you back to life and you keep on reading until your eye lids get heavy and you at last fall asleep.
If there were no Buk he should have been invented. Still a strong anti-dote to the virulent poisons of the "politically correct" Suburban Americana.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Charles lived in the now
Review: However people have come to think of his womanizing, heavy drinking as somehow cool, and something worthy of being emulated.
Charles had it so who am I to call him out on his ways, it worked for him.
Though it is worth it to note that he became a vegetarian and drastically curtailed his drinking towards the end of his life.
But again its all really irrelevant, if you live Charles' life and dont have it, you're a worthless drunk. If you drag human evolution along kicking and screaming like Charles did, being a drunk is a 5 yard penalty in a game of miles.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: the later stuff
Review: i got the feeling that this collection was put together by his wife or publisher from a collection he chose not to do when he was alive--some good stuff here but repetitive of other works

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A compelling posthumous collection
Review: I've been aware of Charles Bukowski's status as a sort of "cult" figure in the world of literature, but had never actually read any of his books. So I picked up "What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire" in a bookstore, opened up to a random poem, and started reading. Well, I was hooked from that moment.

"What Matters" is a posthumous volume of poetry by the prolific Bukowski, who died in 1994. According to the acknowledgments on the copyright page, these poems were written between 1970 and 1990 and were part of an archive which the poet left to be published after his death.

The poems in "What Matters" are written in free verse. Bukowski's vernacular language has an energy, charm, and down-to-earth accessibilty. His main themes are as follows: gambling at the racetrack, drinking, women, death and aging, other writers and artists, poetry itself, and his own public image as a hard-drinking dirty old man. He often writes about people or animals who might be seen as pathetic or seedy.

The book is full of intriguing literary references; he mentions Wallace Stevens, Pablo Neruda, Kafka, Rilke, Lorca, Oscar Wilde, Hemingway, Auden, Henry Miller, "gutsy Ezra Pound," and many more writers. There are many narrative poems, often featuring "Henry Chinaski," who appears to be Bukowski's alter ego.

"What Matters" is full of the cruder side of urban life: the reader will encounter pimps, gamblers, the "dreary and doped / battalions" of prostitutes, a "flowing / tide of piss" from a clogged Salt Lake City urinal, etc. There is often suffering. But through it all, Bukowski is often funny, philosophical, and even gentle. He can even find an epiphany in the act of shaving: "& I'm aware of ghosts & spirits & clouds / & blood & weeping & skeletons & / much more."

In the poem "they arrived in time," Bukowski pays tribute to some of the writers who have moved him: he calls them "those friends / deep in my blood." If you read "What Matters," you might find Bukowski getting deep into your own blood.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Not Buk's best, but some fine work
Review: It's astonishing just how many people, when they hear the name Bukowski, are ready to dismiss him, in less than a breath, as some sort of sexist, macho, skid-row bard, caught up in his teufelskreis of booze, broads, and back-rent, whose poetics consisted of nothing more than a 'gritty roominghouse lyricism.' In these days of postmodern, deconstructed, politically correct aesthetics, it's easy to forget the immense contribution that Bukowski made to American poetry. Picking up where W.C. Williams and the Beats left off, Bukowski reasserted the power of the demotic and its relevance to American experience. Of course this has not been without its negative flip-side, the result being a deluge of confessional, 'slice-of-life,' petit moi poetry, from which contemporary American poetry has yet to recover. But what sets Bukowski apart from all of his imitators is his ability to turn his bleak, existential vision into something truly universal, which is also the secret of his worldwide popularity. You don't have to be intimately familiar with dingy bars, nasty whores, run-down hotels, and the harsh Los Angeles sun to know where Bukowski is coming from. His understanding of the human dilemma, his compassion for animals, and his impatience with conformity and the 'dead-before-death gang' transcended the claustrophobic milieu of down-and-out, blue-collar Los Angeles, and the true crux of Bukowski's art was his remarkable talent to turn his quotidian despair into something that even Japanese bank executives or Spanish art students can relate to, approximating a sort of tongue-in-cheek Kafka of American poetry.
What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire is the second in Black Sparrow's series of posthumous volumes of Bukowski's poetry, and is full of some of his most incendiary poetry to date. This is not just some old mothballed Bukowski that John Martin has dusted off and wheeled out to help pay the rent now that Black Sparrow's star poet is gone; at 412 pages, this is a veritable tome of vintage Bukowski culled from the early 1970s up to the 1990s, from one of America's most influential, oft-imitated, yet essentially inimitable poets ever.
Aside from the usual bar, racetrack, flophouse, and hangover poems, all blazing brilliantly with Bukowski's trademark fusion of angst and irony, there are also many poems of sheer, exacting, even frightening, beauty, executed with all the boldness and audacity of a German expressionist painter, such as the haunting 'full moon,' here in its entirety;

red flower of love
cut at the stem
passion has its own
way
and hatred too.
the curtain blows open
and the sky is black
out there tonight.
across the way
a man and a woman
standing up against a darkened
wall,
the red moon
whirls,
a mouse runs along
the windowsill
changing colors.
I am alone in torn levis
and a white sweat shirt.
she's with her man now
in the shadow of that wall
and as he enters her
I draw upon my

cigarette.

Of course one can't help speculating as to the true strategy behind such posthumous collections. Did the author feel the poems weren't strong enough to be included in other collections? Were they purposely held back by the publisher in anticipation of the author's eventual death and the ensuing dry spell? Or were they simply too personal, too gut-level and potentially libelous to risk publishing during the author's lifetime? In the case of Bukowski, it was obviously partly the latter. He takes merciless jabs, pokes, and swings at many peers and contemporaries, as in the hilarious '4 Christs,' where Bukowski attends a poetry reading in Santa Cruz with 'Ginsbing,' 'Beerlinghetti,' 'G. Cider,' and 'Jack Bitcheline'. In other poems, many other writers, such as Henry Miller and Diane Wakoski, are also caught in the beam of Bukowski's critical searchlight.
For anyone who wishes to re-examine the work of this immensely popular, highly contested poet, this collection is an excellent place to begin, covering as it does a span of over twenty years. For fans wishing to fill out their collection of already published Bukowski, this is a must, a cornucopia of outtakes and bonus tracks that will further establish Bukowski's already enduring place in American literature.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Not Buk's best, but some fine work
Review: It�s astonishing just how many people, when they hear the name Bukowski, are ready to dismiss him, in less than a breath, as some sort of sexist, macho, skid-row bard, caught up in his teufelskreis of booze, broads, and back-rent, whose poetics consisted of nothing more than a �gritty roominghouse lyricism.� In these days of postmodern, deconstructed, politically correct aesthetics, it�s easy to forget the immense contribution that Bukowski made to American poetry. Picking up where W.C. Williams and the Beats left off, Bukowski reasserted the power of the demotic and its relevance to American experience. Of course this has not been without its negative flip-side, the result being a deluge of confessional, �slice-of-life,� petit moi poetry, from which contemporary American poetry has yet to recover. But what sets Bukowski apart from all of his imitators is his ability to turn his bleak, existential vision into something truly universal, which is also the secret of his worldwide popularity. You don�t have to be intimately familiar with dingy bars, nasty whores, run-down hotels, and the harsh Los Angeles sun to know where Bukowski is coming from. His understanding of the human dilemma, his compassion for animals, and his impatience with conformity and the �dead-before-death gang� transcended the claustrophobic milieu of down-and-out, blue-collar Los Angeles, and the true crux of Bukowski�s art was his remarkable talent to turn his quotidian despair into something that even Japanese bank executives or Spanish art students can relate to, approximating a sort of tongue-in-cheek Kafka of American poetry.
What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire is the second in Black Sparrow�s series of posthumous volumes of Bukowski�s poetry, and is full of some of his most incendiary poetry to date. This is not just some old mothballed Bukowski that John Martin has dusted off and wheeled out to help pay the rent now that Black Sparrow�s star poet is gone; at 412 pages, this is a veritable tome of vintage Bukowski culled from the early 1970s up to the 1990s, from one of America�s most influential, oft-imitated, yet essentially inimitable poets ever.
Aside from the usual bar, racetrack, flophouse, and hangover poems, all blazing brilliantly with Bukowski�s trademark fusion of angst and irony, there are also many poems of sheer, exacting, even frightening, beauty, executed with all the boldness and audacity of a German expressionist painter, such as the haunting �full moon,� here in its entirety;

red flower of love
cut at the stem
passion has its own
way
and hatred too.
the curtain blows open
and the sky is black
out there tonight.
across the way
a man and a woman
standing up against a darkened
wall,
the red moon
whirls,
a mouse runs along
the windowsill
changing colors.
I am alone in torn levis
and a white sweat shirt.
she�s with her man now
in the shadow of that wall
and as he enters her
I draw upon my

cigarette.

Of course one can�t help speculating as to the true strategy behind such posthumous collections. Did the author feel the poems weren�t strong enough to be included in other collections? Were they purposely held back by the publisher in anticipation of the author�s eventual death and the ensuing dry spell? Or were they simply too personal, too gut-level and potentially libelous to risk publishing during the author�s lifetime? In the case of Bukowski, it was obviously partly the latter. He takes merciless jabs, pokes, and swings at many peers and contemporaries, as in the hilarious �4 Christs,� where Bukowski attends a poetry reading in Santa Cruz with �Ginsbing,� �Beerlinghetti,� �G. Cider,� and �Jack Bitcheline�. In other poems, many other writers, such as Henry Miller and Diane Wakoski, are also caught in the beam of Bukowski�s critical searchlight.
For anyone who wishes to re-examine the work of this immensely popular, highly contested poet, this collection is an excellent place to begin, covering as it does a span of over twenty years. For fans wishing to fill out their collection of already published Bukowski, this is a must, a cornucopia of outtakes and bonus tracks that will further establish Bukowski�s already enduring place in American literature.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: dad
Review: just read the book...I had abandoned bukowski for a few years ...out living my life...I noticed the book at the bookstore..new post death bukowski...I bought it...read it...my wife is yelling at me now I have to go...

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: America's Premier Zen Poet
Review: The man does not write Haiku, but when it comes to writing about life as it is without agenda and without illusion, we've got nobody better.

And I agree with the other reviewers who find this the best Bukowski they've read in a long time, and I've read all of the Black Sparrow releases.

So get the book. You will not be disappointed.


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