Philip Levine

What Work Is

Offers thirty-three poems that interweave a complex web of myth, public and private history, family, memory, and invention as they explore the timeless truths of human existence

Poems

The Simple Truth

A volume of prose poems and formal verses includes pieces on breakfasting late-shift Detroit auto workers, a woman who sings with the Spanish dawn, and an Andorran communist black-market supplier.

News of the World

A collection of poems culled from the poet's twelve earlier books includes such pieces as "Fear and Fame," "Coming Close," "Every Blessed Day," and the title poem. Reprint.

What Work is

Breath

Poems portray the feelings and experiences of the author and explore themes such as age, faith, and death

Selected Poems

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."

The Last Shift

The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning poet introduces an evocative collection of poems on journeys--from innocence to experience, from youth to age, and from life to death. Reprint.

The Mercy

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.

A Life in Poetry

My Lost Poets

Interviews with the poet Philip Levine on the subject of his poetry

Don't Ask

They Feed They Lion

Not This Pig: Poems (Wesleyan Poetry Program)

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

New Selected Poems

Ronald S. Stroud

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1975.

California Studies in Classical Antiquity, Volume 7

One for the Rose shows once again why he is now to be considered one of our indispensable poets: the brilliance of his language, the elegance of his contruction, and the deep involvement with a very human, very immediate subject matter.

One for the Rose

Poets Laureate Collection (Library of Congress)

The modern poet expresses his outrage at the sufferings of war, the sorrows of autumn, and the loneliness of survival

The Names of the Lost

Autobiographical essays discuss the route by which the author became a poet and examine his relationship with his teachers and fellow poets

Philip Levine

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