Philip Levine
Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet
“One of our most resonant voices of social conviction and witness...”
—David Baker
"What gives Levine's work its urgency is that impulse to commemorate, the need to restore to life people who were never, despite their deadening work, dead things themselves, and who deserve to be rescued from the longer death of being forgotten." —New York Times
Philip Levine "is a large, ironic Whitman of the industrial heartland" who, according to Edward Hirsch in the New York Times Book Review, should be considered "one of [America's] . . . quintessentially urban poets." He was born in 1928 to Russian-Jewish immigrants, in Detroit, a city that inspired much of his writing. Author of 20 collections of poetry, his most recent is News Of The World (Knopf, 2009). The Simple Truth won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995. What Work Is won the National Book Award in 1991. David Baker writes, “What Work Is may be one of the most important books of poetry of our time. Poem after poem confronts the terribly damaged conditions of American labor, whose circumstance has perhaps never been more wrecked." Levine is known as the poet of the working class, and he remains dedicated to writing poetry "for people for whom there is no poetry.”
As well as having received two National Book Awards, Levine is also the recipient of the National Book Critics Award and the Ruth Lily prize. He divides his time between Brooklyn, NY, & Fresno, CA.
About NEWS OF THE WORLD (2009)
Pulitzer-winner Levine invites readers into familiar landscapes—Detroit, gritty America, forests chock-full of truth and beauty, the shaded woods/ where I go evening after evening/ to converse with tangled roots and vines—in his 20th books of poems. He continues to romanticize hardscrabble living—pumping well water, working in an auto factory—but this collection is less an update about the current political or social situation than it is news about Levine himself. He writes in an autobiographical mode, in long stanzas that flirt with iambic pentameter, while also encouraging the reader to participate as he describes An actual place in the actual city/ where we all grew up. Prose poems treat adventures in far away places (You may hear that Australia is a continent. I lived there, I know it's an island) while other poems recall Levine's past: When my brother came home from war/ he carried his left arm in a black sling/ but assured us most of it was there. While Levine charts no new territory, fans will happily get what they came for. —Publishers Weekly
About BREATH (2004)
Levine looks to the forgotten, discounted heart of the matter--"the exquisite in the commonplace"--and what is more common yet precious than breath? Intrinsic to life, breath is the animating force in poetry and music, and Levine's masterfully crafted poems, working-class psalms, are brimming with music in their ringing language, sure rhythm, sensitivity to time, and, more overtly, tributes to musicians Bud Powell, Clifford Brown, and Charlie Parker. Strongly built and finely tuned, these are songs of wind and dust, and of the industrial wasteland, especially that of automotive Michigan, a world of fouled rivers, sooty air, "soiled meadows," and vast parking lots. As is his wont, Levine, an earthy and prayerful winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, offers soulful elegies to Rust Belt heroes; sloggers and escapees; family members; and long-mourned war dead. Men and women are inextricably in the thick of things, vividly eccentric and secretly noble when alive, and nearly sacred in memory, all sharing the same breath, the great exhalation and inhalation of life. —Donna Seaman
