Bone Palace Ballet

Charles Bukowski

The main problem with the fact that Charles Bukowski has now published more work after his death than he did during the first sixty years of his life is that, well, not all of it is all that wonderful (and, really, the quality of the doorstops that were coming out in the seven or eight years before his death wasn't exactly stellar, either). This is not to say that some really, really good Buk books haven't come out posthumously-- The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship quickly became one of my favorite Buk reads-- but Bone Palace Ballet is not one of them. It's a lot like those last few books published before his death in that there are a number of places where you can see why it is that Buk was able to become the sole American poet able to make a comfortable living solely off writing the stuff, the kind of talent that makes Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame or War All the Time a book that, when you're done with it, will stay with you for the rest of your life. But those times are few and far between (though to be fair, there's a lot more "few and far between" in a 363-page book, pretty much by definition, than there's going to be in one of the seventy-page wonders most poets turn out about twenty percent as frequently as Buk). Worth reading for established fans, but newbies will want to go father back in the canon for their first approach.