How the Russians Read the French: Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy Book

Another Visit With Philip Levine

I remember the American poet Philip Levine (1928 -- 2015) from reading and reviewing three of his books in 2001: "The Mercy", "The Simple Truth", and "What Work Is". Levine received the 1991 National Book Award for "What Work Is" and the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for "The Simple Truth". From 2011-- 2012, Levine served as Poet Laureate of the United States.

It has been a long time, but I revisited Levine through his 2009 book "News of the World" which was the last collection of poetry published during Levine's life. In its themes and writing, the collection reminded me of the works of Levine I read years earlier. The writing tends to be simple and understated. Levine tends to write in long unrhymed lines. The poems are often spoken by a narrator and involve a reflection on a past experience. In this volume in particular, the poems are sad and elegiac in tone.

Levine is best-known for his poems of working class Detroit in the years surrounding WW II. Many of the poems in this final collection involve Detroit as Levine reflects on years gone by. The poems capture the decay of the city in recent years as Levine also remembers the deadening work on the assembly lines together with his companions and his family. The poems with sad memories of Detroit and portrayals of what Levine saw as its contemporary state include "Arrival and Departure", "Yakov", and "Homecoming". The poem "Library Days" shows an adolescent reading in the Detroit library and dreaming before realizing that he must hit the streets to do his mundane job. The final poem in the collection "Magic" reflects on loss and meeting as Levine remembers an old Detroit friend who loved the saxophonist Lester Young and "the high tenor cry /behind Billie Holiday that took us closer to paradise/than we'd ever been." The poems set in Detroit were those I most enjoyed in this final book. I was reminded of crime novelist Elmore Leonard who lived in Detroit for most of his life and who made the gritty city the setting of many of his best books, including "City Primeval".

As befitting the title "News of the World" many of the poems in this collection are set in a variety of places and times, including Spain, California, New York City, Australia, and elsewhere. With the changes in settings and events, the poems generally feature a speaker with the same melancholy, reflective tone as the Detroit-based poems. An unusual feature of this collection is the group of prose-poems included in the third of the book's four parts which include the title poem, set in Andorra. These prose-poems add variety and a welcome change of pacing to the collection. In a prose-poem called "Islands" Levine offers a Whitmanesque vision of Manhattan and its liveliness. The poem is more full of hope than most of the other works in the volume as Levine reflects:

"One lives inside an immense, endless opera punctuated by the high notes of sirens & the basso profondo of trucks & jackhammers & ferries & tugboats. And when you merge your own small & sincere voice with the singing you come to realize this music is merely the background to a great American epic."

Although this collection lacked some of the freshness I remembered from my earlier reading of Levine, I was grateful for the opportunity to meet him again, as we both have aged. I enjoyed hearing Levine's elegiac voice reflect on industrial-age Detroit and I also enjoyed his understated broad vision of "a great American epic".

Robin Friedman