I've been a Bukowski fan ever since I read Post Office around 10 years ago.
Buk reminds me of a hybrid of my 2 grandfathers, ruffled, knowing, wise and often mysterious – like a dishevelled Buddha forgiving everything but forgetting nothing.
His poetry and novels are virtually all auto-biographical and chronicle the ups and downs of his blue collar, low paid jobs, bar fly existence. And his relationships with women - don't forget the women.
He was almost anti-social and a one man anarchist movement, but he had a heart of gold underneath the macho/brawling/drunkard exterior - just read about his reflections on his childhood in Ham on Rye or the poem Bluebird.
He's often lumped in with the Beat's, but he was always an iconoclast, one of the uneducated underclass forced to write to keep sane. He said all he needed was a room a bottle of wine and a typewriter to survive.
If you've ever known the alienation and soul destruction of performing a shitty job, being directionless and skint, broken hearted and lost and surrounded by hyena's (just an average day for me), then Bukowski will have a few beautiful words of consolation. He's got all the T-shirts…the empty cans, the spent typewriter ribbons, the suicide notes, the authentic wounded soul.
R.I.P. C.B.
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