Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Philip Levine published Sweet Will, his eleventh volume of poems, in 1985. His last book with Atheneum, it has been unavailable for many years. Because of its subdued and thoughtful nature, it was seen as a transitional book for Levine, one that presaged the tone of much that was to come. Peter Stitt, writing in the Kenyon Review, called it “the quietest book that Philip Levine has ever written,” concluding that “though the river that glides through it is still on the surface, the sweetness of its will runs deep indeed.” And Dave Smith, writing in Poetry, delighted in the poems of “emergent tenderness and faith,” and claimed that “linking himself to Wordsworth, who loved this world uncommonly in uncommon poetry, Philip Levine has lifted his moral tale to the level of joyful celebration.” The poems in Sweet Will are set in Detroit, California, New York, Europe, and the country of memory. Their aim is to bring the overlooked events of daily life into a sharper focus that transcends the ordinary. At the time of its original publication, the book was seen as an attempt to bring together the themes and methods of Levine’s early, groundbreaking work: the anger of They Feed They Lion, the family concerns of 1933, the characters of The Names of the Lost, and the hopes of One for the Rose. Yet it is clearly a mid-career book composed by a poet who can begin to look back in tranquility at a tempestuous life. The poems, including the long meditation of more than five hundred lines, “A Poem with No Ending,” are beautiful and essential. Restored to print, they will resonate with readers who love both the earlier and the later work of one of our most important poets.
LIGHTS I HAVE SEEN BEFORE The children are off somewhere and when I waken I hear only the buzz of current in the TV and the refrigerator groaning against the coming day. I rise and wash; there is nothing to think of except the insistent push of water, and the pipe's
Always a poet of memory and invention, Philip Levine looks back at his own life as well as the adventures of his ancestors, his relatives, and his friends, and at their rites of passage into an America of victories and betrayals. He transports us back to the street where he was born “early in the final industrial century” to help us envision an America he’s known from the 1930s to the present. His subjects include his brothers, a great-uncle who gave up on America and returned to czarist Russia, a father who survived unspeakable losses, the artists and musicians who inspired him, and fellow workers at the factory who shared the best and worst of his coming of age. Throughout the collection Levine rejoices in song–Dinah Washington wailing from a jukebox in midtown Manhattan; Della Daubien hymning on the crosstown streetcar; Max Roach and Clifford Brown at a forgotten Detroit jazz palace; the prayers offered to God by an immigrant uncle dreaming of the Judean hills; the hoarse notes of a factory worker who, completing another late shift, serenades the sleeping streets. Like all of Levine’s poems, these are a testament to the durability of love, the strength of the human spirit, the persistence of life in the presence of the coming dark.
Now in paperback--the final collection of new poems from one of our finest and most beloved poets. The poems in this wonderful collection touch all of the events and places that meant the most to Philip Levine. There are lyrical poems about his family and childhood, the magic of nighttime and the power of dreaming; tough poems about the heavy shift work at Detroit's auto plants, the Nazis, and bosses of all kinds; telling poems about his heroes--jazz players, artists, and working people of every description, even children. Other poems celebrate places and things he loved: the gifts of winter, dawn, a wall in Naples, an English hilltop, Andalusia. And he makes peace with Detroit: "Slow learner that I am, it took me one night / to discover that rain in New York City / is just like rain in Detroit. It gets you wet." It is a peace that comes to full fruition in a moving goodbye to his home town in the final poem in the collection, "The Last Shift.
Philip Levine's new collection of poems (his first since The Simple Truth was awarded the Pulitzer Prize) is a book of journeys: the necessary ones that each of us takes from innocence to experience, from youth to age, from confusion to clarity, from sanity to madness and back again, from life to death, and occasionally from defeat to triumph. The book's mood is best captured in the closing lines of the title poem, which takes its name from the ship that brought the poet's mother to America: A nine-year-old girl travels all night by train with one suitcase and an orange. She learns that mercy is something you can eat again and again while the juice spills over your chin, you can wipe it away with the back of your hands and you can never get enough.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 Written in a voice that moves between elegy and prayer, The Simple Truth contains thirty-three poems whose aim is to weave a complex tapestry of myth, history (both public and private), family, memory, and invention in a search for truths so basic and universal they often escape us all.
A superb new collection from “a great American poet . . . still at work on his almost-song of himself” (The New York Times Book Review). In both lively prose poems and more formal verse, Philip Levine brings us news from everywhere: from Detroit, where exhausted workers try to find a decent breakfast after the late shift, and Henry Ford, “supremely bored” in his mansion, clocks in at one of his plants . . . from Spain, where a woman sings a song that rises at dawn, like the dust of ages, through an open window . . . from Andorra, where an old Communist can now supply you with anything you want—a French radio, a Cadillac, or, if you have a week, an American film star. The world of his poetry is one of questionable magic: a typist lives for her only son who will die in a war to come; three boys fish in a river while a fine industrial residue falls on their shoulders. This is a haunted world in which exotic animals travel first class, an immigrant worker in Detroit yearns for the silence of his Siberian exile, and the Western mountains “maintain that huge silence we think of as divine.” A rich, deeply felt collection from one of our master poets.
Winner of the National Book Award in 1991 “This collection amounts to a hymn of praise for all the workers of America. These proletarian heroes, with names like Lonnie, Loo, Sweet Pea, and Packy, work the furnaces, forges, slag heaps, assembly lines, and loading docks at places with unglamorous names like Brass Craft or Feinberg and Breslin’s First-Rate Plumbing and Plating. Only Studs Terkel’s Working approaches the pathos and beauty of this book. But Levine’s characters are also significant for their inner lives, not merely their jobs. They are unusually artistic, living ‘at the borders of dreams.’ One reads The Tempest ‘slowly to himself’; another ponders a diagonal chalk line drawn by his teacher to suggest a triangle, the roof of a barn, or the mysterious separation of ‘the dark from the dark.’ What Work Is ranks as a major work by a major poet . . . very accessible and utterly American in tone and language.” —Daniel L. Guillory, Library Journal
The inspiration for the title poem of Philip Levine’s A Walk with Tom Jefferson is not the founding father and third president of the United States that most readers would imagine upon hearing the name. Levine’s Tom Jefferson is quite different from his namesake: he is an African American living in a destitute area of industrial Detroit. But to Levine, he is “wise, compassionate, deliberate, honest…a great unknown American.” In A Walk with Tom Jefferson, Philip Levine reminds us why he is best known for his poems about working-class life in Detroit--and why so many people count a Levine poem among their favorites.
Essays, speeches, and journal entries from one of our most admired and best-loved poets that illuminate how he came to understand himself as a poet, the events and people that he wrote about, and the older poets who influenced him. In prose both as superbly rendered as his poetry and as down-to-earth and easy as speaking, Levine reveals the things that made him the poet he became. In the title essay, originally the final speech of his poet laureate year, he recounts how as a boy he composed little speeches walking in the night woods near his house and how he later realized these were his first poems. He wittily takes on the poets he studied with in the Iowa Writing Program: John Berryman, who was his great teacher and lifelong friend, and Robert Lowell, who was neither. His deepest influences--jazz, Spain, the working people of Detroit--are reflected in many of the pieces. There are essays on Spanish poets he admires, William Carlos Williams, Wordsworth, Keats, and others. A wonderful, moving collection of writings that add to our knowledge and appreciation of Philip Levine--both the man and the poet.
Take an adventurous trip into your mysterious inner world. It is there that the answers and guidance we so badly need can be found, all but drowned out in our incessant activity and distraction. Remember who you truly are.Amidst the chaotic state of a world in increasing breakdown, our most basic human capacities are under attack and in danger of extinction. Our(1) ability to direct our attention and to maintain it;(2) to contemplate what goes on inside of us and beneath the surface; and (3) our faith that something is there to rely on within our own souls to guide us when we are lost, as we are now;these are all unwelcome in a world of distraction, greed and superficiality.As a psychotherapist, I had the honor of accompanying people on their journey to find themselves and to witness their courage. In my own life, I have pursued passionately the answer to the question, "Who am I?" After 40 years of seeking, a dream said to me that it was time to speak up, to ask you to consider making or renewing your commitment to the Mystery inside of each of us.We must break free of our zombie-like trance as we march to the beat of corporate hunger for power and profits, and remember what the spiritual traditions of the world have always said, to look within, to observe with interest, respect and curiosity whatever arises as dreams, compulsions, addictions, or symptoms. Likewise, to do so as well with regard to the disasters and catastrophes that are part of our world.In this book I tell no fictitious tale, nor do I seek to recruit you to a group, church, or movement. I speak more as a coach, encouraging you to let go of what you know, to accept the dangers and adventures of moving on, into the Mystery that has always been, in hopes of a renewal and an awakening that can bring you enlightenment about who you truly are, why you are here, and what you can offer to a world in great need of help.The soul speaks to us here, as an orphan rejected and overlooked in our world, asking you to listen and promising to speak helpfully if you do.
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