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duparker's review
3.0
This is a lot of digest. Over 1200 pages of poetry. Some of it is classic in design and meter, and others are clearly written in the beat style. Some of the more out there poems benefit from a brevity, while others are famous for all the reasons you ingest as you move through the phases and styles Ginsberg tried on.
ilybinaya's review
4.0
everything’s all well except that some of the poems feel overly long, which with the similar themes including satirising modernity and it’s discontent for the big beta generation, alongside a great deal of sex, god and suddenly it’s buddha and hindu references, then it all mounts up to a bit repetitive, but here’s the collected poems of one guy over the course of 50 years, i couldn’t complain less.
jonbrammer's review
3.0
Howl, Supermarket in California, and Kaddish are the bangers. Kaddish is particularly affecting, as it takes him out of his zeitgeist-chasing beatnik mode and has him wrestle with the meaning behind mom Naomi Ginsberg's madness and death.
The rest is pretty uneven. There is the drug-addled rambling, the attempts to recapture the lightning in the bottle of his early poems, the fixation with Eastern religious traditions, interspersed with graphic depictions of his sex life. By making frequent references to Blake and Whitman, Ginsberg self-consciously includes himself in the lineage of poetic mysticism and large-hearted Democracy.
The rest is pretty uneven. There is the drug-addled rambling, the attempts to recapture the lightning in the bottle of his early poems, the fixation with Eastern religious traditions, interspersed with graphic depictions of his sex life. By making frequent references to Blake and Whitman, Ginsberg self-consciously includes himself in the lineage of poetic mysticism and large-hearted Democracy.
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