My favorite part of one of the last poems:

This is
The way it goes
Almost everywhere
With everybody and
Everything
As fiercely
In the Highlands
The
Black Swan burns

I’m a big Bukowski fan but this collection was incredibly disappointing. The enjambment and lineation is repetitive and lazy and is significantly more prose than poetry. I could not read the last 100 pages because I started to get so angry about everything. The degree of misogyny and sexism was ridiculous and has made me rethink my perception of Bukowski. I loved ‘The Days Run Away Like Horses Over The Hills’ because poems that were sexist to a degree and the abuse of alcohol were consistent with the collections voice being reckless, self-destructive and in a toxic state of grieving from his late wife. For ‘Dangling Over The Tournefortia’, it reads as overly abusive, sexist and offensive and connected with his personality rather than a period of his life. I’m not saying that behaviour like this and his clear disrespect for women is justifiable in any way whatsoever, and grieving isn’t an excuse, but there is no narrative of any sort in this collection. The lack of technique, depth, the narrow subject matter and obscenity was infuriating to read.

I'm not a poetry fan, but I am a Bukowski fan. Some of these poems leap off the page and attack your brain with a ferocity unlike anything else. Others are little more than prose with funny line breaks. It's a mixed bag. Plus the content grows repetitive. Maybe it was a bad idea to read them all one after another.

But then again, it could be that I'm just a poetry-hating philistine.

2.5 stars out of 5.

A book where Bukowski is in transition from life in LA to the “suburbs” His edge is still here but you can see him being more self-aware about how his reactions don’t connect to his environment.

somehow, i can still find comfort between bukowski's lines. it wasn't his greatest poetry but some of it hit just right.

i think the comfort lays in reading about adverse conditions, foreign underground life, disinterest in life. it is highly unlikely that i'll ever drink six-packs until the morning and get up for a horse race at 11am. but i can almost understand the escape. when the interviewers and young writers come to him, i can almost understand why he can't give them what they want.

bukowski's poems are just stories of loneliness and isolation. they can be problematic and it's not the hardest to dislike him. at the same time, when he drives around and contemplates on people and death, i can understand the desire for chaos. bukowski deserved to see tournefortia bloom but in his heart i think it was burning.