Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #94768 in Books
• Published on: 1992-08-21
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 264 pages

Synopsis
Poems deal with rejection, history, barbershops, friendship, death, longing, loneliness, and disappointment.

From the Publisher
This is the Bukowski of 1946-1966. The poet of gritty backwaters of great faceless cities, rainy bus stations and flophouse one-night stands; also of the moon shining in the gutter, and of the morning-after joys of making love in the sun.

Customer Reviews

A good introduction to a mediocre cult figure
Bukowski is really popular with the kind of people who glamorise drunkeness, dissolution and general brokeness when combined with a "street-smart" artistic bent.

Strip away the persona and the mythology. Forget WHO is writing them and look at the words.

Put simply Bukowski is not a very good poet. He writes an awful lot of mediocre rubbish. Even with his best poems he clutters good lines with filler and doesn't seem to know how to say anything with brevity.

Nevertheless, there is some good stuff in there. Not much, but some. So if you want an introduction to possibly the most over-rated poet of the 20th century, the search starts and ends here.

Buy it
Read vast majority of Buk's poetry.Many times you have to sift
alot of average work to land on the gems.Not with The Rooming House..easily in my opinion Buk's finest poetry , hardly a bad piece amongst this collection.

Beer, drunks, and some fine lines
Like drinking, so it is w/ Bukowski's poetry: it is all a gamble. Some nights the liquor or atmosphere is right and you get good and drunk and feel fine; other nites you get ill and nauseous and spend the early morn puking on the old rug. Some of his poems are excellent, they help one deal w/ this life here; others, well, maybe they should have been used as rolling papers. Still, like drinking, it is time well-spent. We must have endurance and courage to keep on drinking and keep on reading. My hand shakes as I finish...