Beautiful, sobbing, high-geared fucking
and then to lie silently like deer tracks
in the freshly-fallen snow beside the one
you love. That's all.

I love that my bookshelves are a veritable treasure trove patiently--very patiently--awaiting my attention. Case in point: 5 Richard Brautigan books that I took from my parents' shelves, I am unsure whether it was with or without permisssion, sometime at least 8 years ago or longer. They have dutifully persevered through at least 6 moves and have become such a fixture on my shelves that up until recently my eyes generally glazed over the "BR" section. No more! Their voices started piping up a few weeks ago; I could not resist.
Although I know a handful of his short stories, one poem (contained in this collection, I realized), and the gist of a few novels, this is my first Brautigan I've actually read all the way through. The poems? Alright. Some were sweet, some were funny, some were dumb. None stood out to me too much...my favorite remains the one my dear old friends Kate and Sam used as their wedding billboard/events brochure type thingy:

Romeo and Juliet

If you will die for me
I will die for you

and our graves will
be like two lovers washing
their clothes together
in a laundromat.

If you will bring the soap,
I will bring the bleach.

---

I'm on for the short stories. ( )

This was a great find in a bookshop in North Shields; there are some great poems in this slim volume. ( )

Having read nearly half of Brautigan's other work, I astound myself to say I could not translate and feel through most of the poems in this collection, as I felt I had with "The Pill" and "Sombrero" and "Watermelon" and others. I'll have to try again in a couple of years. This is surely *not* the book to introduce Richard Brautigan. Two of the poems wrought chills and tears. Anyway. Of course. ( )

This is one of those books from the late '60's, early '70's, which mystify me as to: what did I see in it at the time? and what did everybody else who sang its praises see in it? There is the occasional interesting line, but for the most part the poems are pretty much like this: I feel so bad today/ that I want to write a poem./ I don't care: any poem, this/ poem. Tripe like that would have gotten me thrown out of my creative writing class. I keep the book now out of historical interest in a period when our critical sensibilities must have been dulled by drugs, sex and alcohol - except I never did the drugs, and the sex and alcohol came along later in my life. ( )