The Simple Truth : Poems - Hardcover

Levine, Philip

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679435808 ISBN 13: 9780679435808

Publisher: Knopf, 1994

Synopsis

Awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for 1995, Philip Levine goes from strength to strength, having received the National Book Ward for Poetry for his earlier book What Work Is. This is the first paperback edition of this text, about which Harold Bloom said, "The controlled pathos of every poem in the volume is immense, and gives me a new sense of Levine."

About this title

Reviews

Levine's third book of new verse in six years offers further proof that since turning 60 his drive to explain his relationship to the world has never been stronger. For him, experience and knowledge are not given but are almost consciously wrested from life ("I'm an American,/even before I was fourteen I knew I would have/to create myself"). Though the usual touchstones of his work-adolescence in the 1940s, the death of Garcia Lorca, Detroit's industrial landscape-are ever present, this collection is more consistently narrative and elegiac than previous ones, elevating the minutiae of personal remembrance to an almost mythic significance, which in turn gives way to the larger permanence and mystery of existence as represented by night sky vistas and the forces of history. Levine (New Selected Poems, LJ 6/15/91) has been so much imitated that his diction and style are now the standard for much current mainstream poetry; thus, his work sometimes seems all too familiar, but few readers will fail to be moved by its earnest effort to reconcile life as lived both outside and inside the mind. Recommended for poetry collections.
Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, N.Y.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679435808
• ISBN 13: 9780679435808
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 69