Charles Bukowski used to write with his head, and forgot the heart very often. He was born in Germany but spent most of his life in United States,specifically in Los Angeles. He is the godfather of the “Dirty Realism”. His style is direct, devoid of any embellishment, rough and pesimistic. Brutal honesty. That is his way to describe life. You see the real world in his books. The real world from his perspective, from his eyes, and you realise how hard is to write about usual things in an usual language and being able to communicate something to the others. He did not mind if he was excessively embarrasing. He wrote what he felt without worrying about what the people could think. I guess in this moment he would not care about someone writing about him. He was like that. But he was a genius. Love it or leave it.
This poem book is a journey inside his way of appreciating life. We find here personal experiences, love-sexual relationships and some alcoholic and philosophical issues. I leave here a couple of lines from one of the poems you can find in this great piece of work.
“Alone with everybody”
The flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break vases against the walls
and the men drink too much
and nobody finds one
but they keep looking, crawling in and out of beds.
Flesh covers the bone and the flesh
searches for more than flehs.
There’s no chance at all:
we are all trapped by a singular fate.
Nobody ever finds the one.
