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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.
Dirges of himself? That is not quite right as a description of Philip Levine's News of the World, for the poems are more wizened than forlorn -- unblinking, not unforgiving. Yet Levine evokes American decline as surely as Whitman did the promise of a nation's youth. In "Our Valley," Levine writes,
You have to remember this isn't your land.Similarly, Levine salutes his grandfather in "My Fathers, the Baltic" for
It belongs to no one, like the sea you once lived beside
and thought was yours.
your gall, your rages,Possession and money may entail self-delusion, but Levine is enough of an appreciator of humanity to capture buoyant industrial workers on payday in wartime Detroit, leaning against Ruby's Rib Shack, elated to have "finished a short workweek, and if they're not rich they're as close to rich as they'll ever be in this town."
your abiding love
for money and all
it never bought
Hell is here in the forge roomSimilar flights of magic realism capture other lost worlds, in an arc tracing from Brooklyn to Barcelona. News of the World broods upon time, decay, loss, and death imbricated within history, labor, and nature. Levine's is a world where men and women "buy and sell each other." It is also "an immense, endless opera punctuated by the high notes of sirens & the basso profundo of trucks & jackhammers & ferries & tugboats."
where the giant presses stamp
out body parts....
The old man, King Henry, punches in
for the night shift with us,
his beloved coloreds and Yids,
to work until the shattered
windows gray.
"This is the world,"--Christopher Phelps
I think, "this is what I came
in search of years ago."
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