SOURCE: A review of War All the Time and Horses Don't Bet on People & Neither Do I, in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. V, No. 3, Fall, 1985, pp. 34–6.

Here, Locklin claims that, in his mid-sixties, Bukowski is reaching his prime, composing narratives comparable to those of Ernest Hemingway.

I felt that Bukowski returned to top form as a poet in Dangling in the Tournefortia (1981)…. . These two recent collections [War All the Time and Horses Don't Bet on People & Neither Do I] do not represent a falling off; on the contrary they present numerous examples of Bukowski at work in what has always been his strongest mode: the scenic or dramatic narrative (or more simply, the story poem with lots of setting and dialogue), but added to his achievements of the past is a diversity that should confound those who would parody the "typical" Bukowski poem of booze, horses...