About the Author

Philip Levine is the author of sixteen collections of poems and two books of essays. He has received many awards for his poetry, including the National Book Award in 1980 for Ashes and again in 1991 for What Work Is, and the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for The Simple Truth. He divides his time between Brooklyn, New York, and Fresno, California.

Philip Levine’s The Mercy, New Selected Poems, The Simple Truth, and What Work Is are available in Knopf paperback.

Reviews

It seems as if Levine's entire life has been flashing before his eyes in his poetry, of course since the early 1960s. Now past 70, the Pulitzer Prize winner (for The Simple Truth) is even more disposed to view the world in hindsight ("I knew then what I know/ now: the past, not the future, was mine."), again re-visioning childhood epiphanies, the "murderous" routine of Detroit factory labor, and his family's eccentricities was there ever a poet with more aunts and uncles? in the unadorned, candid, but fluid manner that his readers have come to expect. Levine waxes elegiac for a lost world and for departed friends while summoning praise for "the exquisite in the commonplace." Despite the richness that he discerns in the life he's led, and for all his backyard stargazing and invocations of childhood heroes and local saints, Levine remains unfulfilled ("hunting/ everywhere for what I'd never find/ in all the years to come, salt for the spirit") and unconsoled even by poetry ("How weightless/ words are when nothing will do"). A bittersweet offering from one of America's senior autobiographical poets; recommended for large collections. Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Though Levine's late-'60s poems (in They Feed They Lion) surprised everyone, by now his readers know what to expect. Levine writes gritty, fiercely unpretentious free verse about American manliness, physical labor, simple pleasures and profound grief, often set in working-class Detroit (where Levine grew up) or in central California (where he now resides), sometimes tinged with reference to his Jewish heritage or to the Spanish poets of rapt simplicity (Machado, Lorca) who remain his most visible influence. Levine's 18th book will neither disappoint his devotees nor silence the doubters. The simple lyric pleasures are still here, however colored with mortality: "I came to walk/ on the earth, still cold, still silent." Many poems memorialize, by name, men now dead whom Levine admired when young: Uncle Nate, Uncle Simon, "great-uncle Yenkl"; "Antonio, the baker"; Bernie whose "mother/ worked nights at Ford Rouge"; Joachim, who once fought for the Spanish Republic; young John, "coming home from the job at Chevy," "even at sixteen... a man waiting to enter/ a man's world, the one that would kill him." "Until he dies, a boy remains a boy," the sequence "Naming" states; often Levine contrasts his boyhood memories with his experience of old age, to serious effect. His poems of grief also form, as Levine says, "a silent chorus/ for all those we've left/ behind." (Sept.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.