The People Look Like Flowers At Last: New Poems
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About this ebook
“if you read this after I am dead
It means I made it”
-“The Creation Coffin”
The People Look like Flowers at Last is the last of five collections of never-before published poetry from the late great Dirty Old Man, Charles Bukowski.
In it, he speaks on topics ranging from horse racing to military elephants, lost love to the fear of death. He writes extensively about writing, and about talking to people about writers such as Camus, Hemingway, and Stein. He writes about war and fatherhood and cats and women.
Free from the pressure to present a consistent persona, these poems present less of an aggressively disruptive character, and more a world-weary and empathetic person.Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski is one of America’s best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in 1920 in Andernach, Germany, to an American soldier father and a German mother, and brought to the United States at the age of two. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there for over fifty years. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp. Abel Debritto, a former Fulbright scholar and current Marie Curie fellow, works in the digital humanities. He is the author of Charles Bukowski, King of the Underground, and the editor of the Bukowski collections On Writing, On Cats, and On Love.
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Reviews for The People Look Like Flowers At Last
8 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Another day, another Bukowski book. At least that's the way it sometimes seems with this particularly prolific writer. Again, though, his work is more hit than miss, and this book finds him in particularly fine form, rolling with the punches, talking frankly about death (as I'm sure it was impending in at least a few of these poems), and quite simply looking into the maw of life without flinching. At this point I've written more than enough poems not only about Bukowski but downright mentioning him for the mark he's left on the heart of American letters. At this point I've written hundreds of poems aping his style in part just to see if I could get away with it and in part because I am so different from not only the way he presents himself in his texts but in all likelihood the way he really was. You can denigrate him for being so simple, but when a person does the things he does so well then what's the point? Bukowski is superior to Hemingway not because like Hemingway he presents a myth of himself but because unlike Hemingway he will break that myth. For that he deserves the keys.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/553. The People Look Like Flowers at Last : New Poems by Charles Bukowski (2007, 301 pages, read Oct 21 – Dec 11)it's not so much that nothing meansanything but more that it keeps meaningnothing,These lines, which are quoted on the back-cover of my copy, stuck in my mind the entire time I read this, paced few poems a day. This collection is one of several posthumous ones by Bukowski, who passed away in 1994, but the first time I’ve read by him. What first strikes me about these poems is that they don’t read like poems. They read more like sketches, partially expressed thoughts quickly jotted down. I could race through them, only occasionally being forced to stop, but then I would miss a great deal. So I look it slow, a few poems a day...and suffered several days through a long section on poems about all the women Bukowski had and about how badly he treated them all (at least he seems honest). Bukowski's poetry feels like an expression of his personality, or a personality anyway. They are bluntly honest, self-critical, and remarkably joyful in their celebration of a rather stark and meaningless world. And they are consistently on theme. The quality and depth seem to vary. There are a number of gems scattered about but also quite a few that seemed very light. Sometimes one that seemed more meaningful would come out of nowhere and catch me off guard.These are very accessible, and maybe even something to recommend to someone who trying to figure out how to get started reading poetry.