What do You think about Burning In Water, Drowning In Flame (2002)?
I thought about just writing a single-word review for this book: Insipid! [I worried that the exclaimation point sounded too "Broadway," but I left it because nobody but nobody would ever put Bukowski on Broadway, (although I can easily see him in an Off-Off Broadway production and wouldn't be surprised if one already existed.)] But that single word, though accurate, doesn't quite encompass all of my ill feelings for this book, this man and his work, and for the veneration they both receive. I'm still searching for those words. I've been searching for years. Maybe I should just forget it, be like Bukowski and write the first thing that comes to mind. Other than the occaisional above-average metaphor and the rare good line there's nothing to this book. It's as empty and unappetizing as the taste it's left in my mouth.
—Brent Legault
This one sat I my shelf for a mere 24 years, yet I continue to be intrigued by this ravaged man and his ruminations. Poetry isn't the first thing I reach for, but Buk's brutal honesty and cantankerous narration is always fresh, as is his clever use of metaphor. These are early poems from the 50's, 60's, then early 70's and the depictions of LA in those times is authentic, like original photography but with historical insight from the drunken everyman. His anger seethes, at god at man and at the whole modern American construct of work and family. Nearly gave this 3 stars, as it is terrain I am familiar with, but he hooked me in the last series with the realism of the street and the beauty he extracts from the mundane, albeit begrudgingly. These are from books long out of print, so a treat from the early days of a writer I've read mid, late and early career. Those piquant moments of reflection in the middle of the night, amidst the boredom and hopelessness in this surely depressed narrator's point of view, are rendered in measured meter and across the physical page. He feels the unfairness viscerally, as recounting a homeless man who had maimed himself in private parts (this stuff just wasn't much written about in the 60s): p 113: "I think sometimes of all the good ass turned over to the monsters of the world, maybe it was his protest against this or his protest against everything.... God, or somebody...bless....him".Or (p 128-129), as the roaming Buk looks across an impoverished landscape for a kindred spirit, finding none, expecting none, but seeking "a living man, truly alive, say when he brings his hands down from lighting a cigarette you see his eyes like the eyes of a tiger staring past into the wind. .. but when the hands come down, it is always the other eyes, that are there always always." The loneliness is palpable. He looks in mirrors a lot, but as the antithesis of Narcissus, as on p. 149 "now I look up and see my face in the mirror: if I could only kill the man who killed the man". That one line keeps me coming back and I will have to read the full lexicon of this distraught and artistic working man of the arts.
—Ned Mozier
The earlier poems in this collection are the best in the lot. Something about the outright simplicity of them, and maybe a different way (than I'm used seeing) of Bukowski writing, a tad more optimism, less world weariness. I'm a fan in general of Bukowski's writing, his novels and his short stories, this my first time reading his poetry and I get the feeling that his true strength, the true heavy walloping of his work lies in the poetry. There is something unique going on here. I've got to keep reading his poetry. Have exhausted all the short stories and novels, I'm glad I saved the poetry for last.
—Bud Smith
