Slouching Toward Nirvana: New Poems
Bukowski's posthumous productivity continues, this time giving us one of his best collections, thanks for which are perhaps due to the editorial labors of John Martin, who closed down his long-running Black Sparrow Press a few years back but maintained his interest in his meat-and-potatoes author. Like many another Buk collection, this one comes in four parts. To see just how good it is, turn to part 2, indicatively introduced by these lines: "There's a lioness / down the hallway // put on your lion's mask / and wait." The section's theme is women: Buk's women, lioness-like, indeed. Approach with caution or, better, as he says, wait. Beauty or, like Buk, beast, each is as sexy, feisty, crude, and smart (sometimes) as he is. These seemingly artless (youtry to write anything good in Bukowski's dribble-down-the-page free style) rants, matched here in force and humor by the ones not about women, are the poetic analogs of the man-woman stuff in the pages of tough-guy novelists from Spillane and Thompson^Bto Leonard.Ray OlsonCopyright &#169; American Library Association. All rights reserved--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.