In this collection we get a full flavour of his preoccupations – gutter-level working-class life, writers and writing, sex, the absurdity of the times, his readers, a love of the zoo of life and humanity. Some poems, such as the peppery “Tough Luck“ – “I remember this time in the German prison camp / we gotta hold of this queer / they come in handy in times of no women” – seem designed to offend. Others, such as the graphic “Love Song” – “I have swallowed the seed / the fuzz / locked in your legs” – reflect his desire to liberate poetry from what he called “anti-life, anti-truth”. “I would break the boulevards like straws / and put old rattled poets who sip milk / and lift weights / into the drunk tanks from Iowa to San Diego,” runs “Corrections of self, mostly after Whitman”.

And like a latter-day Whitman, in these poems Bukowski ranges over the full panorama of human behaviour, an approach someone can only do justice to by fully immersing themselves in the poems themselves. Far from barrel-scrapings – a charge commonly levelled at Bukowski’s poetry – these are often masterly, and importantly very funny, celebrations of what one critic has called “the aesthetic of the little event”. “Love is wonderful,” he writes in “Warm Water Bubbles”, “but so is the stench of innards / the coming forth of the hidden parts / the fart / the turd / the death of a lung.”

There’s gold in this gutter.