If We Take

Charles Bukowski

If We Take-- was one of the celebrated New Year's Greeting cards sent by Black Sparrow to friends, intimates, and those willing to pay an obscene amount of money for very little material. This one, an edition of four hundred copies, contains a single Bukowski poem. A quick trip to bookfinder.com shows that it's going for between $75 and $100 these days, or well over ten dollars a page. (There were another two hundred issued in 1994 to commemorate Buk's death. Don't bother, they're going for the same price.) While it's questionable whether any poetry is worth more than ten bucks a page, "If We Take--" is one of Buk's finer achievements. He both keeps the language at the "elevated" level definitions of poetry call for and, as a bonus, sticks pretty close to the image, as much of his best material does. As well, unlike most Buk poetry, this is (obviously) a very small dose, so the reader isn't confronted with four hundred plus pages of Bukowski. A fine introduction to the man's work, but really quite overpriced at this point.