Philip Levine Books

Levine's poetry often moves me. In my opinion, this is his best book. His poems strike me as being very honest; they make me accept the complicated mess of joys and disappointments that it means to be human. The title poem, "The Simple Truth," explains exactly what I mean (and in a better way than I'm doing here). Please read this book.

Poetry, to many, brings to mind names like Shakespeare, Eliot, Milton, Yeats--figures of artistic genius who crafted intricate texts laden with complex (sometimes private) imagery and embodied in a nearly-inaccessible form. To them, the interpretation of poetry is best left to career academics who spend lifetimes working out such complex systems of words and images. Philip Levine to the rescue! That is, for those resigned to avoid poetry he rescues the immense pleasure it is capable of giving regardless of literary background. His prosaic verse-columns give themselves up to the reader with no fight, laying bare and accessible the truth Levine hopes to convey. Setting is given usually within the first line, as Levine constructs an everyday scene animated with very human characters who live life day by day--trying to make it from this one to the next. From this the poem (often a narrative) builds piece by piece using bits of conversation, natural observations, personal thoughts, and other snippets of life through whatever drama is present to end as simply as it started--sometimes in a whisper, sometimes with a raised voice, but always with simplicity. Without complex formal elements, Levine's poems are forced to rely on their simplicity, their commonality for what is not an ornate beauty but a simple one. Such verse shows its Americanness with every word, with every image as it articulates simply the truth it lays open--there for the taking. In The Simple Truth is an artist at the zenith of his poetic genius--an artist who is, at the same time, true to his self and to his roots as an American. This is what poetry should be and is meant to be.

Philip Levine once vowed to be the voice of the poor, the simple, those without voice--a vow he has not broken in his sixty-plus years of writing poetry. In 1995, Levine was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his collection of poems, "the Simple Truth". That prize would mean less to him than the knowledge that thousands of people have found enjoyment and comfort from reading his poems--that from his work, they came to better understand our common vulnerabilty to the state of being human. Levine's poems are an echo of the emotions trapped in the reader's heart; they are a friendly voice giving substance to what has been lived, but not spoken. Levine's title poem "The Simple Truth" invites the reader to recognize and celebrate the stark beauty of simple things. Each poem in this collection builds on the other to introduce the reader to the poet, who in turn introduces readers to perfect poetic expression, so personal that they will stop and say "Yes!! That IS how it is!" Anyone who cannot relate to or reconginze themself in at least half of the poems in this fine book, have not read it. That's "the simple truth."

Philip Levine writes in the title poem of this collection:

"Some things/you know all your life. They are so simple and true/they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,/they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,/the glass of water, the absence of light gathering/ in the shadows of picture frames, they must be/ naked and alone, they must stand for themselves."

These lines capture many of the themes of this Pulitzer-prize winning book. The poems in this collection are deceptively simple, "naked and alone". They generally involve an incident or person, recollected by the poet from his past. The incident is recounted in bare unrhymed lines, without hyperbole or judgment. We are encouraged to see the incident, as we see the still life reproduced on the cover of the volume and to let it "stand for itself". The poems are elegaic in tone and the effect of the memory is generally one of deep sadness.

Many of the poems have a deliberately pictorial quality, as reflected in their titles, that remind one of a photo or of a painting in a museum. In many cases, the reader is tempted to conceive in the mind's eye a painting to accompany the poem. This is true, particularly, as the book progresses into its final section with its descriptions of the poet's mother ("My Mother with Purse, the Summer they Murdered the Spanish Poet"), father ("My Father with Cigarette Twelve Years before the Nazis could Break his Heart"), and others ("Edward Lieberman, Entrepreneur, four years after the Burnings on Okinawa") One of the poems of the collection is title simply "Photography". Ironically, this poem is less pictorial than many others. It relates a sad incident from the poet's childhood involving his Aunt, and others, and focuses on the ravages of time and memory.

The poems also focus on the role imagination plays in constituting our reality. The first poem of the collection "On the Meeting of Garcia Lorca and Hart Crane" relates a meeting between these two romantic 20th Century poets and alludes to Crane's apparent suicide in jumping from a ship bound from Vera Cruz to New York. Crane's tragic but romantic death is juxtaposed with the vision coming "to an ordinary man staring/ at a filthy river" as he contemplates not only Crane and Lorca but his son falling to his death "from/the roof of a building he works on." With a voice of irony, the poet asks us to "bless the imagination. It gives/ us the myths we live by. Let's bless/ the visionary power of the human-- the only animal that's got it--"

These poems have a multi-layered simplicity realized through an understated voice of sadness and illuminated by imagination.

In my opinion, Philip Levine is perhaps the most honest poet writing in America today. As a master's candidate in an English department, I've endured much of the postmodern fluff that dominates modern poetry. In Levine's work, you won't find the typical introspective ramblings of the self-obsessed modern poet. Levine writes clearly and distinctly, with images that carry ideas. Levine doesn't resort to petty academic parlor tricks to describe the disappearence of self--check out "Silent in America" for a portrait of a man with a voice so powerful that he cannot even use it.

In *New and Selected Poems*, readers will find a real master craftsman at work. Along with artfully buried rhymes and off rhymes, Levine also experiments quite successfully with both meter and syllabic verse. The amazine thing, however, is that unless you really pay attention to the work, you miss these things. Levine hypnotizes with his ideas and phrasing and clear, sharp images.

Here are the voices of the lost; here are the voices of the damned. Levine rejects the postmodern destruction of self and has become a voice of the American poor in the Whitman tradition. As an epigraph in *New and Selected Poems* reads, "Vivas for those who have failed."

Levine has had a great influence on me and my work. Anyone writing poetry should check out Levine's work. I'd recommend _What Work Is_ also. In my opinion, it's his best book.

Philip Levine¹s Collected Works is an amazing biography of a life. Spanning a so-far-incomplete life, we can follow Levine¹s progress of maturation. While the beginning poems are strong, it is the middle and end pieces that were the most startling, poems about the working class and later his son. His ability to mix narration and the more typical elements of poetry is extraordinary. Compare the first and last sentences of ³One For The Rose²: ³Three weeks ago I went back / to the same street corner where / 27 years before I took a bus for Akron, / Ohio, but now there was only a blank space / with a few concrete building blocks / scattered among the beer cans², ³Instead I was born / in the wrong year and in the wrong place, / and I made my way so slowly and badly / that I remember every single turn, / and each one smells like an overblown rose, / yellow, American, beautiful, and true.² Levine writes American poetry in the American diction better than anyone since Whitman or Sandburg. His language is conservative and seems simple at first, but when the poem blossoms we are all the more surprised and excited because of it. This book is a gem to read and contains a story, making it as hard to put down as your favorite novel.

Philip Levine is an amazing poet and this really is an amazing collection. I recently saw him do a reading and was so floored by the brutal honesty and anger of his poems. I am an 8th English teacher and have given my honors classes some of his poems, which they loved. Philip Levine works on so many levels and can be enjoyed by anyone. Must reads from this collection include: "You Can Have It," "They Feed They Lion," and "Animals are Passing from Our Lives."

A devotion of Levine's life's work, the world of work, at last becomes one of his book's true focus and shows Levine, one of our greatest living poets, at his best. The controlled lyricism of his narratives hone in with precision, as when he pulls in on a woman's forearm at work, a minute detail in a vast world of labor to show us the universality of a struggle Levine himself has endured. While not every poem lives in the factories and workplaces, the fundamental aspect of work in our lives manifests itself in each piece. The short lines and continual enjambment gives his stanzas both the feel and appearence of quality reportage and yet are infused with an empathy and passion for his subjects that both moves and educates. This is the democratization of poetry that Wordsworth aspired to and Whitman acheived. Levine carries on in that tradtion and concretizes, with this book, his place among those American poets to be read in the next century.

It is sad that we in the United States do not appreciate the strength and the variety of the poetry that our country has produced. A major instance of a contemporary poet whose writing deserves attention from a wider readership is Philip Levine. His book, "What Work Is" won the National Book Award for poetry in 1991. He has produced an impressive quantity of poetry which, in its very restraint and poignancy, can help bring meaning to people.

This is a short collection, consisting of four untitled sections. Section III consists of a single extended poem, "Burning" which is broadly autobiographical in character. The remaining three sections consist of a number of short poems with essentially two themes: the lives of the working poor prior to WWII and Levine's experiences as a boy growing up in Detroit. The poems with these themes overlap and are interspersed throughout the book with the earlier sections emphasizing vignettes of individuals doing the ordinary, desultory jobs that are the lot of most of us (such as "Coming Close", "Fire", "Every Blessed Day" and "What Work Is") while the latter section emphasizes Levine's Detroit experiences, the toughness of being a kid, his relationship with his brother, his love of boxing, and his exposure to Anti-Semitism. ("Coming of Age in Michigan", "The Right Cross", "The Sweetness of Bobby Hefka" "On the River".)

The poems are lucidly written with understatement and a lack of sentimentality which underscores the emotions and the passions they contain. It might be useful to compare these poems to the work of three other writers.

First, the poems reminded me of Walt Whitman, in their compassion for an attempt to understand the American worker. They lack Whitman's bravura and optimism, however, and content themselves with painting harshness and with emphasizing the tenacity people need to get by.

A writer with somewhat similar themes to Levine is the under-appreciated Victorian novelist, George Gissing in his books of lower class life in Victorian London such as The Nether World. Levine has a similar sort of attraction to the life of the poor, the unsuccessful and the down and out. He has at once a sympathy for his characters and a distance from them that Gissing seems to lack, for all his portrayals and descriptions.

A third writer is the late poet-nnovelist Charles Bukowski, a favorite of "underground" readers. Bukowski writes of ne'r do wells, prostitutes, and drunkards, -- as well as doing a lot of writing about himself. Levine has some of the same attraction to the scorned of society, but his people are the working poor, and their stories are told with restraint and dignity, unlike those of Bukowski, and also unlike the work of Bukowski, with literary skill and grace.

This is a book of poetry that has both the sadness and the grittiness of life and the toughness to understand and surmount it.

For the longest time I have been carrying this thin volume of poems with me, as a solace and comfort item over the course a very interesting career in the Marines and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Below is a second volume I am adding to my briefcase, in French and English side by side.

Philip Levine is a warrior's poet. Here are nine lines from the poem PEACE:

One words go slowly out
and the sun burns
them before they
even speak. It is
as though the earth
were tired of our talk
and wanted peace, an end
to promises, perhaps an
end to us.

See also
The Astonished Universe

Joseph Legaspi is a brilliant poet already well known within New York City's poetry networks. With Imago, the mainstream finally has an opportunity to also view his haunting, deliriously beautiful words. Though seemingly impossible, Legaspi's work manages to create belonging from dispossession, without ever succumbing to clichéd or naïve statements about of life. With eyes that are compassionate and unconditionally loving, Legaspi creates beauty while showing the volatile, often painful, interplay of our everyday emotions and experiences. Legaspi finds the magic of life wherever he looks. His poetry is a true gift.

Passage: Europe is an impressive, powerful, at times surprising coffee table artbook compendium of 80 superbly produced black and white photographs by Richard Copeland Miller as he traveled for years throughout Europe. With his artist's eye Miller captures the unplanned and unexpected dramas of everyday life ranging from the joyous experiences of ordinary people to horrific images of the Holocaust. Very highly recommended for photography students, and an ideal Memorial Fund selection for community libraries, Passage: Europe is enhanced with an insightful, informative introduction by Philip Levine revealing the core of Miller's photographic vision and his captured images famed within an historical context.

This is a wonderful collection of stories with beautiful illustrations. It is one of the few books of folktales that seem equally suited to boys and girls -- with daring tales of female pirates (!) alongside princes and wisemen. While the stories are geared for older kids, even kids 5+ will enjoy hearing them. I can't give this book a higher recommendation.

Compiled and edited by Harry Thomas, Talking With Poets comprises unique selection of interviews with five very different, but highly notable poets: Robert Pinsky, Seamus Heaney, Philip Levine, Michael Hofmann, and David Ferry. A deep and moving examination into lives, motivations, and how life experiences flow into written words on the page, Talking With Poets is an enthusiastically recommended look into what goes into the making of elegant and expressive verse, and of these five men who are particularly gifted in such creations.

My friend always made fun of this book's title and I would say "no man no" and he would say "but what the heck is 'They Feed They Lion' , with the black vernacular, the guy's Jewish!" but then I made him read the poem and he liked it. If you like post-cold war experimental poetry, blacks and jews, heavy industry and Detroit, then man this book is for you.

i think i would have liked this short, simple book a lot more if i were younger. having read other phillip pullman books, i suppose i was expecting something a little more substantial, but nevertheless, i did enjoy the simplicity and quick read. and since the book was only a buck fifty, i'd certainly say i got more than my money's worth. but if you're an adult like me (i am, despite the fact that i never use caps) you may just want to borrow it from the library

My daughter read this for a book club and really enjoyed this.

A bit shallow for Pullman. Not as interesting as I'd hoped.

A perfectly crafted children's story, a lovely balance and the characters were delightful. Some of the wit reminded me of Terry Pratchet but alot more subtle.

I am reviewing The Firework Maker's Daughter by Philip Pullman. I would give this book 5 stars because it is very descriptive. This story is about a girl name Lila who wanted to be a firework maker. She asked her friend Chulak to ask her father how to be a firework-maker. Chulak told her she needed to go to Mount Merapi. The only thing she didn't know was that she needed the water from the goddess of the lake.