BOOK REVIEW/ INTERVIEW: Lawrence Gladeview Just Ignore the Beer Stains (PigeonBike Press, London, Ontario, 2011)- 72 pages.

This is the first full-length collection of poetry by the 28 year-old Gladeview, who presently lives in Colorado with his wife Rebecca- who features in many of these poems. The 54 poems adopt a pared-down, lower case, minimalistic style highly reminiscent of the American poet John Yamrus. The poems are short narratives of less than 100 words and are characteristically geared towards making a dryly humorous personal or social observation about ordinary events- attending a funeral, visiting a chiropractor, ordering drinks, discussing poetry, picking up a hitchhiker and the like.

The PigeonBike Press typeface is bright and shiny and beautifully set-out. The cover includes a black & white cropped photo of a remote escarpment by the British photographer Leonne Bennett which evokes a raw, desolate feeling. In contrast, the title Just Ignore the Beer Stains is cheekily self-referential, asking the reader to ignore the poet’s ‘beer stains’, that is, his youthful imperfections- his purported romance with alcohol and the blemishes you might find in his early writings.

Most of the poems are written in first person from “Larry’s” point of view. The poems are often propelled by colloquial dialogue which reveal, through irony and understatement, the misunderstandings or quirky ways in which people attempt to communicate with each other. The collection is remarkably consistent in voice, subject matter and technique but a few of the poems stand out. Personal favourites include the terse car ad ‘Dad’s Classified’, ‘Thirsty & Forgetful’ about the speaker being asked to show his ID at a bar he has frequented for years, the metaphoric ‘Coming To Terms’ in which Larry likens his relationship to his woman to that of a cocker spaniel being dragged along a street, and ‘Poetry Needs To Be Natural’, in which the poet tongue-in-cheek expresses his poetics: ‘Poetry Needs To Be Natural/ not/ forced/ like the/ coat closet/ quickie/ before/ your auntie’s/ memorial.’

Overall, perhaps too many poems in the collection are about poetry or the writing process which creates the impression that Gladeview has lived thus far through the narrow prism of poetry rather than through hardened experience. As you read through his work you often sense the artifice, of Gladeview meta-fictionally mythologizing his relationship with his wife and his readers. And unlike Yamrus, don’t expect profound glimpses into the human condition. Gladeview is simply and unambiguously mapping out his first joyful steps of discovery. He has plenty of time to unbolt the veneer and express the misery and terror which awaits us all.

That said, it is certainly refreshing to read a new small-press poet who is not wallowing in a drug or alcoholic induced fog of self-loathing. Gladeview’s humour sometimes appears contrived but it can also be hugely appealing. And it is his candid, intimate tone which really makes this book sing.

An Interview with Lawrence Gladeview 27 February 2012

Bold Monkey: When did you first develop an interest in poetry and who were some of your early influences?

Lawrence Gladeview: I began to read poetry with the writing of Shel Silverstein. His poems share stories and characters through a genuine and humorous voice, something that I admire and influences my own writing.  My late college years were when I truly started to pay attention to poetry and began reading poets Yusef Komunyakaa, Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Charles Bukowski.  It wasn’t until a few years after college that I really put a pound of flesh into poetry, began to grow as a writer, and introduce myself to more underground poets like John Macker, Michael Adams, John Yamrus, Todd Moore; and gals like Ann Menebroker, Puma Perl, and Lyn Lifshin.

Bold Monkey: According to your web page: http://lawrencegladeview.com/ you started publishing your poetry in 2009. Can you briefly recount the events leading up to your decision to finally submit your work in 2009?

Gladeview: At the time I started submitting my writing to publications, I was sharing my poems with friends and workshopping pieces online.  From there it turned into mailing out poems in an SASE, submitting electronically, and posting pieces to my now defunct Righteous Rightings blog.  Over the past few years I have been very lucky to have my poems featured here and there in print and online, but the fire burns most when those rejection slips find their way into my mailbox and makes me punch the keys harder.

Bold Monkey: You graduated from James Madison University with a degree in English. I’m curious as to what you studied there, especially the texts, lessons and experiences which may have stimulated you to write.

Gladeview: Most of my study at James Madison focused on African American literary genres and Eastern European authors, although here and there I would have a Period American Poetry class or Writing Composition workshop.  But the single most explosive experience of my college years was attending the Furious Flower Poetry Conference held on campus in 2004.  The conference featured the most illuminating, contemporary African American voices in poetry including Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Gwendolyn Brooks among others.

Bold Monkey: I recall reading somewhere that you arrived late to ‘underground’ poetry. Why the interest and what magazines and writers first appealed to you and why?

Gladeview: Underground poetry has no rules, says something authentic, and above all makes the reader react.  Billy Collins reads up on a stage behind a pulpit using vocabulary no one understands to describe something that’s already been said. Meanwhile, Tony Moffeit is taking up at a local poetry reading wearing leather pants with a snakeskin belt, wielding a harmonica and singing the blues.  

Bold Monkey: There are thousands of magazines out there. What are a few that showcase the type of poetry you enjoy reading? What specific qualities do they have which draw you in?

Gladeview: PigeonBike, Epic Rites, and Lummox Press are three publishers that do a great job printing high quality writing from diverse poets and artists.  The time and dedication these guys put into their projects shows in the product; who wouldn’t want their poems featured in a publication like that?  Their authors are provocative and unapologetic, writing addictive poems and stories that deliver the goods on authentic human sentiment.

Bold Monkey: Can you discuss your initial involvement with PigeonBike Press and your subsequent dealings with the editor R.L. Raymond in the publication of Just Ignore the Beer Stains?

Gladeview: Rob approached me about possibly doing a book last summer and I immediately jumped on it.  I had been featured in a few PigeonBike magazines and was familiar with Rob’s commitment to print publishing and featuring the very best.  From then on we started to get together a manuscript of poems, paying close attention to order and trimming the fat.  By late November, Just Ignore The Beer Stains was available for purchase and the final product could not be more well constructed.  Rob never compromised in the process of putting out this collection and it shows.

Bold Monkey: I have read many of your earlier poems in which you adopt a wide range of forms and styles- some which are quite sophisticated and experimental. The obvious question is- Why do you adopt throughout Beer Stains a pared down, minimalistic style, highly reminiscent of John Yamrus’s?

Gladeview:  I have been writing for over five years now, and over that time I have been finding my voice and solidifying my identity as a writer, and that growth comes from pocket haikus, bourbon narratives, and travel lodge tales.  John has been a great supporter of my poetry the past year and has always been kind in offering his feedback and advice.  Just Ignore The Beer Stains is a collection of poems smart-ass in attitude, humorous in behavior, and aged in a bottle.

Bold Monkey: What’s next for you?

Gladeview:  I have a few poems selected for publication in PigeonBike and Epic Rites projects coming out this year that I am very excited about.  I also have a couple of readings planned around the Boulder and Longmont, Colorado area this spring and summer.

Bold Monkey: Lawrence, thanks for taking the time to answer my questions and to let me enter your world.

Gladeview:  I just want to thank you again for your dedicated approach to this review, I cannot express my thanks enough.  Look forward to continued fantastic reading on Bold Monkey and will be sure to keep in touch! Cheers.

Buy Lawrence Gladeview’s book Just Ignore the Beer Stains at PigeonBike books here: http://pigeonbike.blogspot.com.au/p/lawrence-gladeview-just-ignore.html

A list of Gladeview’s previous publications can be found on his impressive looking website- LAWRENCE GLADEVIEW: Barroom Raconteur, Cocksure Lover and Foul-Mouthed Poet: http://lawrencegladeview.com/

A recent interview of Gladeview appeared in Horror Sleaze Trash here: http://www.horrorsleazetrash.com/interviews/13-questions-with-lawrence-gladeview/

Lawrence Gladeview is co-editor of Media Virus. Check out issue #31: http://mediavirusmagazine.wordpress.com/

                             

BOOK REVIEW/INTERVIEW: Mather Schneider HE TOOK A CAB NYQ Books, New York, 2011 (108 pages).

This is the second full-length book of poetry published by Tucson taxi driver Mather Schneider. Most of the poems in the collection were inspired by Schneider’s long-term experience as a cab driver. The poems are largely anecdotal narratives written in a simple and understated way. The clarity and immediacy of the language makes you feel like you are sitting in the back seat of Schneider’s cab as he drives his quirky and sometimes demanding and difficult  fares to their destinations- be it a detox center, Whataburger, a nudist camp, or hospital.

As is explained in the preface, the title ‘he took a cab’ is derived from an old jazz saying that means someone has died. The title poem ‘He Took a Cab’ is based on a true story about a cabby who was tragically shot and killed by a passenger who tried to evade paying a fourteen dollar fare.

The daily grind of a cab driver is represented through a variety of voices and credible real life experiences. Schneider chronicles the long hours, the fickleness, the randomness, the messiness, the in-fighting of an essential job which is sometimes fraught with danger. The reader easily slips into Schneider’s world as he drives around Tucson and into the surrounding desert- the shitty drivers, the quirky, unending variety of people he crosses paths with and the thrill and unpredictable flux of the journey- all come alive.

It is Schneider’s descriptions of people and how he often allows them to tell their own stories in their own words which makes this book special and highly entertaining and amusing to read. He cleverly draws portraits of his passengers and fellow cabbies to comment on human nature- both good and bad. He is sometimes scathing in his attack on the viciousness, hypocrisy and racism of some of his fares. In ‘Trust Me’ he drops off a foul and sleazy prison guard who has been cheating on his wife. In ‘Devotee’ he mocks a rude and ungrateful adherent of the Dalai Lama who is in town for a talk. In ‘The Virtues of Self-Locomotion’ he uses black humour to express his hatred of school bus drivers who believe they are superior and ‘immune from street law.’

Schneider can also show great tenderness and empathy for his passengers- especially if they tip well. In ‘6234 N. KOLB’ he drives a man to the airport on his first vacation in 22 years. On the way the passenger gets a phone call telling him his father has had a heart attack. As they head for the hospital there is another call- the father has died. In ‘TREASURE’ his fare Margie introduces him to her pet snail Chuy on their way to the Valley Pet clinic.

Schneider also provides the reader with insights into the crazy characters who drive cabs for a living. Their world is highly competitive and largely thankless. Amongst them there is Filthy Phil, an Vietnam-vet whose latest scheme is to marry a young Russian bride, Darren the Shark, Hobgoblin, and Vic, an eighty-four year old whose idea of fun is to activate his small battery-powered fart machine.

Some of the more memorable poems include extended metaphors and make some interesting philosophical observations about the job. ‘A Bone A Day’ adopts a stoical position: ‘If/ at the end of a twelve-hour day/ you’ve got a bone in your pocket/ you’re doing alright.’ ‘Destiny of a Cab Driver’ Schneider sees himself as being chained to his cab: ‘I have no destination of my own./ I spend my life driving in circles/ and never get any closer/ to the center.’ The wonderful poem ‘Zen Cabby’ is about an impossibly perfect day, when everything miraculously falls into place for the driver. He remarks at the end: ‘The trick is to trust nothing/ but the deepest laws,/ and the only way to trust/ is to let go.’

The poems in He Took a Cab are street-smart and have an emotional depth which is never forced or false. This is finely crafted  poetry which is easy to read  and picture in your head. Most humorous and intriguing are the real people Schneider has met and has shaped through his poetry.

INTERVIEW WITH MATHER SCHNEIDER- 16 OCTOBER 2011

Q1: Most of the poems in your new collection He Took a Cab are about taxi driving from a variety of perspectives. How long have you been driving a cab and can you briefly describe a typical night shift and the emotions you go through? 

A1: I’ve been driving a cab, off and on and for various companies, for 6 years in Tucson and I also drove a cab in a small town in Washington State, Bellingham, years ago. I don’t do night shifts anymore and in fact now drive for a company that only transports non-emergency medical patients to and from the doctor, paid for by the state insurance. So a lot of the poems in the book are about my past experiences. The emotions you go through during a typical 12 hour cab shift run the gamut from elation at a 50 dollar tip, to anger at traffic, to fear from thugs or drunks, to heartbreaking pity for a 12 year old boy with bone cancer and a mask over his face because the very air makes him sick. It’s amazing how tired you are after a cab driving shift, even though you’re just sitting on your ass the whole time.

Q2: I can imagine in driving taxis at all hours that over the years you see some of the worst and best in humanity. What have you learnt about people and about life in general since you’ve been driving hacks? Do any incidents stand out?

A2: I’ve learned that scumbags and saints come in all sizes and from all economic brackets. Many incidents stand out, and I write about those. Just today I went to one of our hospitals to pick up a patient. She was sitting in a wheelchair at the doors of the hospital looking out at the road. Her caregiver, on seeing me coming, turned around for a second to grab the old lady’s bag. At that moment, the old lady in the wheelchair started rolling forward, could not control it, and rolled out the door, across the sidewalk and over the curb into the street. She did a full face plant on the pavement, blood was everywhere and she was screaming like a lunatic. I felt bad for her, and I also felt bad for the caregiver, who would surely lose her job.

Q3: On the inscription page there is note that ‘any references to historical or real locales are used fictionally.’ Most of your poems appear to have been inspired by real people and events. I am curious, was it essentially a legal requirement to fictionalise your experiences?

A3: You know, I never noticed that. Yeah, I guess that’s just a legal thing, I have no idea. I have always been honest about the fact that my material comes from real life, although I do change names and embellish and combine stories in ways that do not conform exactly to reality.

Q4: The epigraph notes that the title of your collection He took a cab is old jazz slang for someone who has died. The title poem ‘He took a cab’ is about a cabby who is shot and killed by a passenger who tried to evade paying a fourteen dollar fare. Why did you choose this title? Have you been in many dangerous situations yourself?

A4: I’ve always liked the title poem and I’ve always liked the title, thought it would make a nice catchy title for the book. Then I discovered that phrase’s usage by the old jazz guys. Like someone might say, “Hey, whatever happened to Leroy?” “Oh, he took a cab, man, he took a cab.” Meaning he died. Yes, I’ve been in some dangerous situations. I’ve had a gun pulled on me, and I’ve been threatened and punched in the face by passengers. But, all in all, I’ve been lucky. I mean, it’s Tucson, after all, not Chicago or Detroit or LA. When that cabby got shot, every cabby I knew was shaking their head, because you just don’t follow someone into an alley, you have to refine your instincts, and really you hope to sniff out the dangerous characters BEFORE they get into your cab. Sometimes you just can’t tell, though.

Q5: Many of the poems in your new collection were previously published in important small press magazines such as Nerve Cowboy, American Dissident, Commonline and others. How long how you been collecting these poems for publication? 

A5: The poems in this book cover about the last 4 or 5 years.

Q6: Can you provide some insights into your writing process? Does your inspiration come quick? Do you need to do much editing, redrafting? What do you hope to achieve in your writing?

A6: I make notes to myself, usually on the backs of our taxi business cards, and then later I write them out if I can find the time or energy. These days I’m lucky to write new stuff once a week, though I’m constantly tinkering with old stuff. I do rewrite quite a bit, which is just a matter of reading a piece over and over, letting it sit, reading it again, mainly trying to tighten and get rid of cliché, try to make the language as clean and fresh as possible. I do not think there is anything particularly saintly or noble about writing, and as far as what I want to achieve with it, well, I would like people to be haunted by my words, to laugh, to be entertained, and maybe to feel something deep inside they didn’t expect.

Q7: It is a great achievement to have a poetry book published by New York Quarterly Foundation. Can you briefly explain the events leading to your collection being published by them?

A7: Thank you. I submitted poems to New York Quarterly, once or twice a year, for 12 years, and was rejected every time with form rejections. Then, one day about 2 years ago, I got an acceptance. Then I submitted more and they took 3 more! Then, Raymond Hammond, the editor, wrote me and said he wanted to publish a book of mine. Working with him on the book was fun and painless, for the most part. He gave me free reign and it is my drawing on the cover. We only got in one fight during the process, which is pretty good for me!

Q8: Have you discovered any new writers over the last couple of years which impress you? If any, what do you enjoy about their writing/ message?

A8: I like Jim Valvis and M.P. Powers. Valvis’s honesty and humility and humor are wonderful, and Powers has a lyrical quality and sense of humor that I like. But, in general I am not impressed with most of the writing I read these days.

Q9: I’ve read many of your short stories about some of your taxi driving adventures. Do you intend collecting these in a volume one day? 

A9: Yes, I do have a manuscript which is held together by the connective thread of cab driving. Some of the stories only mention cab driving in one sentence, others are basically journals of a cab driver. I have had many of them published on the internet but I can’t break into any respectable print journal to save my life. I hope to get the book published one day, and I’m working on it now, revising it. The title of the book is NEXT TIME TAKE SUNRISE, the title story of which was published in Zygote in My Coffee. Here’s the link to that: http://www.zygoteinmycoffee.com/100s/issue134nexttimetake.html

Q10: What’s next for you?

A10: Well, we just bought a house, a foreclosure for 36,000 cash, and my wife and I will be moving soon, so that is exciting, to get out from under the yoke of rent. And I hope to get that book of prose published, like I said. Other than that, just more writing and working and living. 

Thanks again Mather for sharing your views with me and my readers.

Thanks George!

Buy Mather Schneider’s new collection He Took a Cab here at NYQ Books: http://www.nyqbooks.org/title/hetookacab

Find my 2010 review of Schneider’s first collection Drought Resistant Strain on Bold Monkey: http://georgedanderson.blogspot.com/2010/04/drought-resistant-strain-book-review.html

Book Review Rob Plath A Bellyful of Anarchy (Epic Rites Press) 302 pages

In doing research for Rob Plath's latest 2017 releases IN ROT WE TRUST (graphic poems with Janne Karlsson) and Swallowtude (novel), I noticed my 2010 review of Plath's seminal work A Bellyful of Anarchy was no longer available on BM. I republish it here for those unfamiliar with the poetry collection:

Plath is a significant figure in the American small press and I found his first full collection of poetry 'a bellyful of anarchy' to be highly accessible and entertaining. This is a hugely ambitious book written in free verse. The book is divided into nine sections with each loosely focused on a central theme exploring many of Plath’s favourite topics: death, how bent a species we are, growing up, cats, writing about his poetics and the usefulness of his middle finger in expressing all of the above.

The book’s title ‘a bellyful of anarchy’ refers to Plath’s underlying intent. He questions the illusory values of the American Dream and imagines a world where 2x2= nothing. In ‘laughing dust’ he mentions that his truest desire’ is for his poems ‘to enter the blood of/ some readers/ egg them on/ to chaos.’ In ‘verbal demolition’ he expresses a desire to write books that are ‘true pamphlets of chaos’. Plath’s revels in the chaotic and constantly challenges the reader to confront the reality of existence- to see the skeleton beneath the ‘torn flap’ of humanity. He flings the reader into the abyss and ‘like brain surgery’ buzzes the top of our heads off and leaves us flailing in a world gone wrong. Plath provides no answers but points us to where ‘the human meat hooks’ and ‘that battered ball of worms’ can be discovered. In ‘verbal demolition’ Plath concludes:

i wanna write books that make people ignite
my pages, smear the ashes beneath their eyes
like war-paint & go out to scalp
the false wig from society’s vain skull

Plath’s main strength as an imaginative writer lies in his mastery of metaphor and he deliberately sets out to carve his sentences into the reader’s flesh. In ‘Illuminations from the bottom of the meat carousel’ he aptly sums up his ideology:

these sentences are scalpels & pliers
performing body-length incisions
& peeling the trouble-making skin off

revealing the red striped musculature
then finally the shining skeleton

In his writing Plath metaphorically strips back all pretense and enters a dark world where he explores suffering and the underlying certainty of death. He appears to see everything as possessing a hidden reality and its revelation is the only thing that truly matters to him. In the compelling poem ‘incoming nails’ the speaker explains how the torture of everyday life is preferable to living the lies of others:

a lot of days I feel I am w/in
these thin walls
my flesh ripped by the sharp points
of incoming nails

but somehow it’s better than rubbing shoulders
w/the crowds of perfumed corpses
walking the streets.

One of the most interesting sections of the book is ‘pistol-whipping my angel’ where Plath furthers his nihilistic and existential views. Life to Plath is ‘mostly a murder fest’ viewed by an indifferent, taunting and sometimes evil god. In ‘mother’, reflecting on the loss of his mother, the persona of the poem, presumably Plath, morosely concludes:

a good god would have spared
us these unliftable burdens.

i stare at the umbra-
the blackest part of
a shadow.

it is not yr departure i see
but rather god’s eye.

jet & full of nothing.

In ‘god is a bad shoemaker’ Plath playfully mocks the concept of god and the idea that ‘god’ would have created such a tortured and grotesque being as himself. Similarly, in ‘god is a drunken tailor’ he posits:

god, yr a bad tailor
were you drunk
when you sketched
my earthly clothes?

Plath views religion as ‘the vatican lenses’, as another obstruction society throws up to shield people from realising who they really are. In ‘the cataracts of conformity’ the speaker of the poem falls into a ditch and upon looking up:

everything was illuminated
i’d found what the
world was keeping me from
discovering-
i was my own god

In one of the book’s most powerful poems ‘let there be snow’ this image of the poet being a god is furthered. In describing the preparation and horrific aftermath of an abortion Plath writes, ‘just she & I alone in this universe/ two gods unmaking a life’.

Despite the dark words of despair there is always an uplifting sense of joy which derives from Plath’s constant playfulness with language. Behind the noose and the rotting flesh there is always Plath the magician juggling the alphabet, devising new and striking ways to express himself and the world he inhabits. Some of his best poems appear to work randomly, as a sort of personal quest to intuitively develop interesting combinations of words and images. In ‘for a friend who is feeling deranged’ Plath starts with a playful couplet, ‘play jumprope/ w/yr colon’ and the poem quickly evolves, skipping from one set of juxtaposed ideas to the next in a smooth transition.

Another personal favourite is ‘the universe is a rape baby’ which progresses as a series of apparently random but interlocking thoughts. In this poem Plath applies his chaos theory to the max. The result is a profound and hilarious poem. Each stanza is an experiment, flaying the air, attempting to make sense of it all. Characteristically, Plath has the answer, tongue in cheek:

the big bang was the result
of god molesting the innocent void
the universe is a rape-baby

Despite the overall brilliance of Plath’s book, the collection has some minor blemishes. For one, its size is excessive. The book could have been reduced by fifty pages or so without detracting from its over-arching concerns. Many of the poems appear to be shuffled variations of others, much like a jazz musician restating an idea through improvisation. I would have also preferred a larger font size. Like most readers I’m used to reading size 12. The font in this book is actually size 8. It was chosen by Epic Rites Press to keep the book at a manageable 300 pages. Shipping costs would have otherwise been prohibitive.

The book is filled with dozens of strong, highly memorable poems but one section ‘the solitaries & the swarming’ was particularly weak, and contributed to an uneven feel to the collection. Cats can metaphorically provide a counterpoint to the human condition, but I quickly lost interest in this section despite living with many over decades.

Plath is a talented and uncompromising poet. I admire his hatred of ambition, of capitalism, of calendars, how he sees ‘skyscrapers as hell’s erections’. I love his meta-fictional explorations into language, his clever dark plunging of the soul, his splashing of bile onto the page. But what keeps the 40 year-old New York City poet resiliently humping the alphabet? He answers this defiantly in ‘the golden zero sutra’:

so how does one keep
from being frayed alive?
how does one remain
in one’s body, untouched
by god, calendars, clocks?

but determined manhates ambition by flailing yr fists
by stabbing the air
w/ yr middle fingers

Buy it here: http://www.epicrites.org/

BOOK REVIEW- Charles Bukowski 'The Pleasures of the Damned'

Charles Bukowski THE PLEASURES OF THE DAMNED, POEMS, 1951-1993
Edited by John Martin, Canongate, Edinburgh, 2010, 528 pages.

You have to admire Bukowski for his tenacity to prove himself as an original artist and for his enormous body of work. I’m not too sure what Buk would make of his revamped, posthumous career, but he is becoming increasingly famous and this is the 14th major publication of his creative work since his death in 1994. The large blurb on the back cover of this new UK release claims: THE BEST OF THE BEST OF BUKOWSKI. As pointed out by Zachary T. Ciulla, about half of the poems collected in this volume were not published until after Bukowski’s death. It is difficult to imagine Bukowski allowing a lot of this material to be published, but I suppose it is of sufficient interest to appeal to a Bukowski fanatic or scholar.

There are some astounding poems in this collection, such as ‘The Genius of the Crowd’, ‘Dinosauria, we’ and ‘the bluebird’ but there is also a lot of second or third-rate filler. You can sometimes read 100 poems in a stretch and not find one worthy of detailed future consideration. I get the impression that Bukowski’s long term venerable editor John Martin slapped this one together, tossing in the mix, dozens of uncollected or newly published poems to give the volume a fresh, previously unread feel, even amongst Buk's most ardent followers. The book is certainly worth reading, but overall, a vast majority of the poems did not challenge me or extend my understanding of the Bukowski canon.

If you are a novice reader of Bukowski, rather than waste your hard earned bucks on 'Pleasures of the Damned' check out some of his finer earlier work- he actually agreed to have published during his lifetime. You can’t go wrong with LOVE IS A DOG FROM HELL (1977), BURNING IN WATER DROWNING IN FLAME (1978) or WAR ALL THE TIME (1984).

Postscript 20 Dec 2011

Today, I checked out the source of Bukowski's poems in this volume in the 'alphabetical index of poem titles' at the back of this book to gauge the accuracy of Ciulla's observations above. The results are as follows:

poems published in Bukowski's lifetime: 144
posthumous poems:                                 89
uncollected:                                             20

The poems in the collection during Buk's life are largely taken from his earlier collections up until 1979 while his posthumous work is largely drawn from the collections What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire (1999) and The Night Torn Mad with Footsteps (2001). Important collections, such as, The Flash of Lightning Behind the Mountain (2004) are totally ignored. I suppose Martin chose this material from a gut-level. Hope he eventually churns out a detailed book about his relationship with Buk and his real hand in the editing process.