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Stated First Edition. Bright, clean & tight copy, unread, in AS NEW condition. + As a bonus, I include a poem 'Our Valley' broadside Signed by Philip Levine, sent from Knopf to the bookseller. "Always a poet of memory and invention, Philip Levine looks back at his own life as well as the adventures of his ancestors, his relatives, and his friends, and at their rites of passage into an America of victories and betrayals. He transports us back to the street where he was born 'early in the final industrial century' to help us envision an America he's known from the 1930s to the present. His subjects include his brothers, a great-uncle who gave up on America and returned to czarist Russia, a father who survived unspeakable losses, the artists and musicians who inspired him, and fellow workers at the factory who shared the best and worst of his coming of age. [] Throughout the collection Levine rejoices in song--Dinah Washington wailing from a jukebox in midtown Manhattan; Della Daubien hymning on the crosstown streetcar; Max Roach and Clifford Brown at a forgotten Detroit jazz palace; the prayers offered to God by an immigrant uncle dreaming of the Judean hills; the hoarse notes of a factory worker who, completing another late shift, serenades the sleeping streets. [] Like all of Levine's poems, these are a testament to the durability of love, the strength of the human spirit, the persistence of life in the presence of the coming dark." [jacket copy] "Philip Levine is a great American poet, and BREATH brings the wonderful news that he's still at work on his almost-song of himself."--Terrence Rafferty, The New York Times Book Review. "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."--Donna Seaman, Booklist. Pristine hardcover w/brilliant corners & crisp edges, a square & tight binding, wrapped in a bright-as-new jacket featuring a handsome & evocative photograph of Don Cherry waiting for the subway. A beautiful Knopf volume, quite presentable.
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