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    What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire
    Unavailable
    What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire
    Unavailable
    What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire
    Ebook456 pages3 hours

    What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

    By Charles Bukowski

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

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

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

    What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire is the second posthumous collection from Charles Bukowski that takes readers deep into the raw, wild vein of writing that extends from the early 1970s to the 1990s.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMar 17, 2009
    ISBN9780061873317
    Unavailable
    What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire
    Author

    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 What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

    4.5/5

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    • 4/5
      One look at the 'also by this author' page at the front of this book is wholly intimidating to any would-be or actual poet. I count 33 titles listed. What an output! And these are just the books! This book, 'what matters most is how well you walk through the fire', contains about 200 poems. Multiply that by 33 and you have 6,600! Well, a few of the titles are novels, so say 5000. That's still a lot of poems.But wait a minute! Are they all cracking good poems? No. And there really must have been some effort put into combing through C's literary remains to assemble those 8 volumes which are posthumous to his death in 1994, of which this book is one. But I have to say that, having read several Bukowski books by this time (Dec 2009), even the most ephemeral offering does have something about it that makes it worth publishing. And what a tribute THAT is to ANY poet!On one of his other books there's a blurb comparing him to Wordsworth in the way he uses the language of the ordinary man. Blurbs mostly make preposterous claims but I think that this particular claim has a lot of truth in it. Even at this distance, Wordsworth's Prelude has an immediate appeal. Bukowski too. He 'cuts to the chase' very often and the nub of the matter at hand is dealt with without any prancing around and also without being damaged by too soon an exposure. I'm really stuck to chose a poem rom this book which best exemplifies this directness (200 to chose from, remember!) but if I have to, then might pick 'more argument', a list poem that escapes being a mere list poem (and how boring they are!) due to the presence of the man himself having one of those interminable rows with one of the women that come and go throughout his poetry. Anyway, it's not the list that is the meat of the poem. It's the row! Or maybe I'd chose 'the first one', a wonderfully minimalist treatment of loss. By the way, I think anyone who has read Seamus Heaney's 'The Early Purges' would be interested to see how Bukowski handles the same subject in his poem in this book called 'the mice'. Heaney's poem looks forward to many a dilemma created in the future by farmhand's actions. Bukowski's focus is on an unhappier past. Both youngsters are deeply affected.Great poet. One my favourites.
    • 4/5
      a good collection of poetry. not his best but still enjoyable