Ex-Bum

Previously unpublished poems by Charles Bukowski show a mellower, if no less voluble, version of the man. Review by D H Tracy

©New York Times

Before he died in 1994, Charles Bukowski flagged a number of his favourite unpublished poems for eventual publication. Come On In! is the latest posthumous volume to appear, and while no specifics are given most of the poems here seem to date from the writer's later years, when - having finally achieved some wealth and fame - the laureate of sub-bohemian Los Angeles had become an "x-bum", driving a BMW, carrying an American Express Gold Card and tapping away on the Macintosh that apparently enabled his late productivity. When a visitor asks Bukowski what he has left to write about, now that "you no longer live with whores, you no / longer engage in bar room brawls", the poet turns philosophical: "I tell him that trouble will always / arrive, never worry about / that."

So what does an ex-bum write about? Roughly a third of the poems are about poetry, writing and the ups and downs of the low-rent literary life. A couple are set in the last place you would ever expect to find Bukowski – the university – but he stays only long enough to shake his head at the chumps who work there. There are as many poems about other people's bemoaning his obsession with whores, booze and horses as there are poems about whores, booze and horses. The language throughout is, for Bukowski, relatively high-toned and decorous, and consequently nothing in Come On In! is quite as laugh-out-loud good as earlier (though still late) poems like 'Dogfight Over LA' and 'Locks'.

But this doesn't matter much. Bukowski's poems have something of the commodity about them; they are a substance, like beer or bourbon, and one goes to them not for quality in the whole but for the voice and attitude present in any part. On this Bukowski delivers through a charismatic self-destructive passion, simple and unserious pain ("it all seemed a joke to me, even when some guy was / crushing my head against the edge of some urinal"). And they offer no anodyne for this pain but simple and unserious camaraderie. As the title poem puts it, "Plenty of room here for us all, / sucker."

Come On In! and his late poetry generally show a mellower, if no less voluble, version of Bukowski. His leeriness of fame speaks as well of him as any poem in the book, whose incremental contribution to the Bukowski legend (the posthumously published poetry alone now runs into thousands of pages) may be negligible anyway. The question is whether Bukowski himself is negligible. When not besotted or revolted, the readers I know are condescendingly appreciative of his work but also somewhat annoyed by it, and uneasy about the measure of quality that Bukowski proposes for his poems: he's not much for making classical allusions, sounding mellifluous, sticking it to the man or even, really, baring his soul, but he can take a punch and drink you under the table.

While aesthetically brutal, these considerations have a way of exposing pretence, even the pretence of exposing pretence. And perhaps this is what he was after, pummelling life into simple enough terms to be within reach of a limited art.

©New York Times