When Charles Bukowski died at 73, he left behind more than 45 volumes of poetry and prose, an oeuvre that to this day makes up the most entertaining affront ever delivered to modern letters. The books are not so much a spit in the face of literature as a beer belch.

He occupies a place among those outcasts, outlaws, madmen and solitaries whose outspoken visions achieved against all odds a global presence -- Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Hubert Selby Jr., William Burroughs. Yet even among such outsiders, he remains outside, a consummate loner, since they, unlike Bukowski, reveal in their various styles a certain hard-won haggling with literature that was, to him, the stuff of dupes.

Miller, for example, struggling into his 30s to find his own voice, was liberated through committed engagement with Surrealism and late-night readings,replete with bedbugs, of the open-ended writings of Blaise Cendrars (whom he translated for himself from the original French, no less, and with only the barest grasp of the language).

Beckett not only served slavishly as personal aide to James Joyce but also emulated his mentor in both literary style and even personal fashion, to the extent of wearing, like Joyce, tiny feet-pinching French shoes (this is the reason, by the way, that his protagonists in "Waiting for Godot" suffer frequent sore feet).

To Bukowski, such travails were so much garbage. He served no such apprenticeship. Whereas both Beckett and Miller hurled themselves at the button-snap boots of literary Paris, Bukowski was thrown face down and bloodied into Western American drunk tanks.

Permanently disfigured in early adolescence by painful boils so severe they had to be surgically lanced, he worked in a succession of heartbreaking menial jobs, culminating in a numbing nine-year stint in the U.S. Post Office. His writing school was the racetrack. He had, in the early years, no contact with any authors of note.

Aside from a fawning matinee-idol-type infatuation with such gritty authors as Hemingway, John Fante and Mickey Spillane, there was, in Bukowski, no real grappling with literary questions of any sort.

From his pen came no monographs on Lawrence or Rimbaud (a la Miller) or on Joyce or Proust (about whom Beckett wrote lengthy meditations). And though Bukowski gained wide reception as a poet, to the end he refused to call himself one, preferring instead the generic title of "writer."

"Poet" as a term was, in his judgment, given the condition of the field, corrupted and corrupting to anyone of real integrity.

With such an absence of "literary" undertow to his career, how then to explain not only the extraordinary resilience of his reputation but also the artistic triumph of his poems? For despite anything one might say, a triumph they are.

Those collected in "Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way," Volume 46 in the Bukowski library, are a huge offering of never-before- published works assembled by the "writer" himself for posthumous release. They are no less good and in some ways better than anything we've seen from him before. Think of the late verse of W.B. Yeats, in which maturity won over method and the emerging voice was freed from its last formal constraints.

The Charles Bukowski of these poems has achieved the final ease for which he sought his whole life: the poems light-fingered, a pleasure to digest, the voice so imminently present that one can scarcely believe that it speaks to us from the grave.

In the poem "what can I do?" Buk might be chatting with us this very evening in his favorite L.A. sports bar:

it's true:

pain and suffering

helps to create

what we call

art.

given the choice

I'd never choose

this damned

pain

and suffering

for myself

but somehow it finds

me

as the royalties

continue to

roll on

in.

Imagine the guffaws erupting with that punch line, drowning out the football game on the overhead TV.

He is our William Hogarth in verse and prose: an underdog's sensibility pitched to the bittersweet roughhousing of a deliciously crude world:

"you think Valenzuela's

going to sign with the

Dodgers?" the barkeep

asked me.

"doesn't matter to me,"

I said, "I don't like

baseball."

"you don't like baseball?"

he asked. "are you some kind of

queer?"

"not that I know of," I

told him. "give me another

beer."

as he bent over the cooler

I was privileged to view his

vast gross buttocks.

near the crotch of his

white pants was a large yellow

stain.

he came up with the bottle

flipped the lid off and

banged the beer down

in front of me.

"if you don't like baseball

what the hell do you

do in your spare time?"

he asked me.

"f-- ," I said.

"dreamer," he answered

picking up my change and

walking to the cash register.

"that too," I said.

I don't think he

heard me.

A blue-collar moroseness clings to him, even though the Bukowski of these poems is a rich and famous man. Behind him lie the film hit "Barfly" (in which he is portrayed by Mickey Rourke), the best-selling books "Ham on Rye" and "Notes of a Dirty Old Man," translation into 12 languages and a worldwide following. Yet even in victory, he remains the perennial loser:

I think that I would feel better about every

thing if I was sitting instead in a cheap room

with flies crawling my wine

cup,

not pleasant, of course, but at least it's war of

another kind.

but I am in Beverly Hills and that is

all that there is to

it.

I reach for my gold card as I

twist in my chair and

ask the waiter for the

bill.

His whole life has been a fistfight with death and a celebration of loss: at the race track, watching long shots trip and fall; in the bars, down in the sawdust, clutching his bloody nose; in the flophouses and brothels, the jail cells and boxcars. It is the key, perhaps, to his great popularity that he makes somehow bearable what most Americans -- bred on hedonism and denial, avoidance of pain and narcissism -- cannot afford to face or think about: loss and death.

He has spent his whole life courting risk in the face of annihilation. And now as he faces the certainty of his own demise, his poise, in the poem, "like a dolphin," is simply majestic:

dying has its rough edge.

no escaping now.

the warden has his eye on me.

his bad eye.

I'm doing hard time now.

in solitary.

locked down.

I'm not the first nor the last.

I'm just telling you how it is.

I sit in my own shadow now.

the face of the people grows dim.

the old songs still play.

hand to my chin, I dream of

nothing while my lost childhood

leaps like a dolphin

in the frozen sea.

But this man who, to paraphrase one of his poems, wagered his life as he struggled, damned the odds and damned the price, has won the ultimate long- shot bet. His poems have defeated death. For Bukowski lives as surely within these poems as he ever did on earth.

Alan Kaufman