Hard Ground, poems by Tom Waits, photographs by Michael O'Brien - review

Can Tom Waits do with poetry what he does in song? Tom Waits is widely acknowledged as the poet par excellence of the dispossessed. From his first album, Closing Time in 1973, through Blue Valentine, Rain Dogs, Mule Variations and many more, he has probed the dismal underbelly of America's cities and suburbs, producing seedily lyrical vignettes of tattered and busted lives, of prostitutes, drunks, low-life gangsters, hustlers, hucksters and schmucks. The keynotes of his songs are failure, frustr...

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