Within a Sky Full of Earth

the short poem
like the short life
may not be the best thing
but
generally
it's
easier.

this is a short
poem at the end
of a
long
life

sitting here
looking at
you
now

then
saying
adios!
CHARLES BUKOWSKI in "Slouching Toward Nirvana"

I hate writing reviews. I also hate the consumer as much as the producers of goods for the most part but right now I'm feeling sprendthrift towards humanity due to all the Yuletide cheer. This book is rubbish. Nearly all of the posthumous books released by Black Sparrow/Ecco of Buk's work are fifth-rate, fragments of his glory days of skid-row bum-dom. It's as if they scraped his cancerous boils and produced enough DNA to put his soul back to life in a maggot's body with a Frankenstein's aptitude for producing works of art. The result is echoes of echoes of a former greatness. The rawness of the famed writer is lost in complete drunkenness and scraps of poems that were never published in books because they were leftover material. Maybe that's why John Martin sold off the rights because he couldn't continue to publish a dead man's best of works for obscene sums of money. If they retitled it "WORST OF THE WORST: AFTERMATHS OF GLORY Vol. 5" I might feel better about the whole thing. But as is this is vainglorious puke.
Reviewer: Boz Hubris