The Pleasures of the Damned: Poems, 1951-1993

by Charles Bukowski

Overview

“The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.”—Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author

“He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.”—Leonard Cohen, songwriter

The Pleasures of the Damned features selected later poetry of Charles Bukowski, America’s most influential poet.

To his legions of fans, Charles Bukowski was—and remains—a counterculture icon. A hard-drinking wild man of literature, a stubborn outsider to the poetry world, he struck a chord with generations of readers, writing raw, tough poetry about booze, work, and women, that spoke to his fans as “real” and, like the work of the Beats, even dangerous.

The Pleasures of the Damned is a selection of the best works of Bukowski’s later years, edited by John Martin of Black Sparrow Press, including the last of his new, never-before-published poems.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061228445
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	12/02/2008
Pages:	576
Sales rank:	203,469
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

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.

Date of Birth:

August 16, 1920

Date of Death:

March 9, 1994

Place of Birth:

Andernach, Germany

Place of Death:

San Pedro, California

Education:

Los Angeles City College, 2 years

Read an Excerpt

The Pleasures of the Damned
Poems, 1951-1993

the mockingbird

the mockingbird had been following the cat
all summer
mocking mocking mocking
teasing and cocksure;
the cat crawled under rockers on porches
tail flashing
and said something angry to the mockingbird
which I didn't understand.

yesterday the cat walked calmly up the driveway
with the mockingbird alive in its mouth,
wings fanned, beautiful wings fanned and flopping,
feathers parted like a woman's legs,
and the bird was no longer mocking,
it was asking, it was praying
but the cat
striding down through centuries
would not listen.

I saw it crawl under a yellow car
with the bird
to bargain it to another place.

summer was over.

The Pleasures of the Damned
Poems, 1951-1993. Copyright © by Charles Bukowski. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Editorial Reviews

This long and well-edited collection is likely to stand as the definitive volume of Bukowski’s poems.” — New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher

This long and well-edited collection is likely to stand as the definitive volume of Bukowski’s poems.

New York Times Book Review

The Pleasures of the Damned is an appropriately long collection because it is likely to stand as the definitive volume of Bukowski's poems. It is well edited by John Martin, the publisher of the estimable Black Sparrow Press, who was Bukowski's editor for most of his working life…I am not inclined to make elaborate claims for Bukowski, because there is no one to compare him to, plus or minus. He wrote in the language of his class as surely as Wallace Stevens wrote in the language of his own. This book offers you a fair chance to make up your own mind on this quarrelsome monster. It is ironical that those who man the gates of the canon will rarely if ever make it inside themselves. Bukowski came in a secret back door.
—The New York Times

Jim Harrison

In a very real sense…The Pleasures of the Damned is as much about John Martin as it is about Charles Bukowski. It's an insightful walk through the work of a poet by the man who knew him best, and it reveals Bukowski in the many, often conflicting dimensions that make him such a popular, accessible, and, yes, great artist…This extraordinary collection establishes Bukowski as much more than just another West Coast Beat poet. At last, maybe fans like me won't have to apologize for ranking him among the best.
—The Washington Post

Bill Press

Bukowski's chatty free verse (and fiction) about disappointment, drunkenness, racetracks, flophouses, lust, sexual failure, poverty and late-life success amassed an enormous following by the time of his death at age 73 in 1994. Billed as the last book with new Bukowski poems in it, this hefty collection also culls from his prior books, and it is all of a piece: the warnings about lost potency, the ironic takes on ailments of mind and body, the comradeship with everyone down at the heels, down on his luck, or down to his last shot of booze. Bukowski's best poems have an exaggerated, B-movie black-and-white aura about them. One new poem warns "that/ nothing is wasted:/ either that/ or/ it all is." In another, "hell is only what we/ create,/ smoking these cigarettes,/ waiting here,/ wondering here." Near the front of the volume comes a page-and-a-half-long verse manifesto, "a poem is a city," that might describe what Bukowski could do: "a poem is a city filled with streets and sewers," it begins, "filled with saints, heroes, beggars, madmen... banality and booze," and yet "a poem is the world." (Nov.)

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