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The Night Torn Mad with Footsteps
Paperback
ISBN13: 9781574231656
Publisher: Ecco Press
Published: May 31 2002
Pages: 360
Weight: 1.02
Height: 0.95 Width: 5.92 Depth: 9.02
Language: English
Rented rooms, cheap wine, and five proud cats: late-night poems hammered out at the kitchen table.
This collection of previously unpublished poems offers the author's take on squabbling neighbours, off-kilter lovers, would-be hangers-on, and the loneliness of a man afflicted with acute powers of observation.
Bukowski moves through the cigarette smoke and cracked asphalt of Los Angeles, observing faded jockeys at the track and drunks slumped behind thin apartment walls. The poems chronicle unpaid bills and radio broadcasts, settling into a stubborn and clear-eyed resignation.
Downtown avenues and dingy hotels surround him with petty landlords, bruised fighters, and sudden departures. He watches each small disaster unfold from his typewriter, finding an improbable and hard-bitten grace in simply enduring.
The tone is gritty and amusing, spiralling out towards a cock-eyed wisdom.
- Raw Honesty: Bukowski recounts John Fante's sparse Malibu funeral and his own quick escape to the racetrack, stripping literary grief of all high-minded posturing.
- Poems About Life: From feeding the landlady's chickens for morning whiskey to playing Bach records, these pieces capture the quiet routines behind the typewriter.
- Against the Odds: Long shifts packing crates at the electric company and sorting mail at the post office give way to surviving street brawls and small rooming houses across the country.
- Also by This Author: You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense, Love is a Dog From Hell and The Last Night of the Earth Poems.
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