Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Stephen Kessler

Critical Essay by Stephen Kessler

SOURCE: "Bukowski Unbound," in Poetry Flash, No. 238, January, 1993, pp. 1, 6–7, 9.

In the following essay, Kessler offers a broad survey of Bukowski's work and describes the poet as "a human being of extraordinary character, an indomitable personality who has grown in stature with every document he produces."

The photo in back of Charles Bukowski's latest collection of poems [The Last Night of the Earth Poems]—a four hundred page tome turned out as the author was approaching and passing seventy—shows a face seasoned by pain and suffering into an expression of tough equanimity, of weary compassion for the human dilemma. It is a face facing up to its own mortality: wise, gentle, kind. As anyone who's read his recent work is aware, Bukowski has lately lost his edge of angst; his comic meanness has sweetened into a humbly ironic gratitude for survival. The voice of the vicious drunk,...
(read more)