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Title: The Mercy: Poems by Philip Levine ISBN: 0-375-70135-4 Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf Pub. Date: 30 October, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.33 (12 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Poignant Memory
Comment: Philip Levine was born in Detroit to immigrant Jewish parents. The adjustment his family made to a new land, together with the poverty of the Depression, has made a deep imprint on his writing. He worked at a succession of blue-collar jobs before becoming a professor in Fresno, California. He has received both the National Book award and the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry.
In the poems of The Mercy, the poet looks back upon incidents in his life or in the lives of those dear to him. The title poem describes his mother's journey to the New World on a ship both aptly and ironically named "The Mercy". The poet looks back at her voyage, including his own research on it, to recapture the shock of the voyage to a then nine year old girl with no English attempting to find her way in a strange land. A related poem earlier in the volume describing an immigrant's reaction to the New World is "Reinventing America." (Perhaps an ironic reference to the reinvention of government theme of the late 1990's)
I think the poems are designed to capture, for the poet and the reader, the details of the small moments of life, remembered and recreated. In "Salt and Oil", one of the fine poems of the collection, Levine describes a process that underlies the theme of memory in the book:
"Three young men in dirty work clothes/ on their way home or to a bar/ in the late morning. This is not/ a photograph, it is a moment/ in the daily life of the world,/ a moment that will pass into the unwritten biography/ of your city or my city/ unless it is frozen in the fine print/ of your eyes."
So Levine etches these moments for us in his poems.
There are poems describing the loss of innocence (as in "Flowering Midnight" which mourns "the lost white world we thought was ours for good.") and poems describing the dissipation, in loneliness even of the lure of sexuality (as in the poem "The Cafe" which describes a bar scene and concludes "the air thickens with smoke, and no one cares/if the two young girls show their thights or their breasts, some nights/the young men along the bar are too tired even to die.")
Levine is no stranger to the power of music. I found his tribute to Sonny Rollins in "The Unknowable", particularly moving. ("He is merely a man--/after all--a man who stared for years/into the breathy, unknowable voice/of silence and captured the music.")
The poems are in a restrained free verse, in the manner of a chastened and somber Walt Whitman. The poetry also reminds me of the earlier Jewish-American poet, Charles Reznikoff, in its telling vignettes of the lives of ordinary people, its emphasis of a moment, in it use of understatement, and in its reluctance to moralize.
Memory can bring sadness, wisdom, reflection, but it can also result in hope. There is no easy optimism in this collection. This collection is etched sharply with individual recollections of a life. It may help the reader share in the process of looking back with understanding, love, and forbearance.
Rating: 4
Summary: Poetry is a beautiful human invention
Comment: The poems of Philip Levine are allways a pleasure for the people who love poetry, this book is a good exemple of what man can imagine to make our world more human.
Rating: 4
Summary: What Mercy Is
Comment: [These comments appeared in a February 24, 2000 article in the Seattle Weekly that is available in full online at http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0008/books-lightfoot.shtml]
Philip Levine, born in 1928 to a poor family in an immigrant neighborhood of Detroit, is the author of 17 books of poetry and the winner of a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. He spent most of his twenties in brutalizing industrial jobs, and after he escaped into a different life as a writer, the world he left behind became his central subject. Levine has devoted his art to rendering justly the blunt, weary dramas that unfold in blue-collar neighborhoods and factories, in poems that are works of praise as well as pathos. Like his award-winning "What Work Is," his new collection, "The Mercy," presents recollected characters such as an immigrant peddler, a thick-armed farmer, a butcher, a man so happy to be changing a flat tire with his father that he sings--all palpably alive in the capacious honesty of the poet's vision. May Levine's blunt songs of the single grit-blown moment--that woman digging bulbs into bare ground, this man-handled oildrum under exactly this sky--be heard and remembered through our shiny times.
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Title: New Selected Poems by Philip Levine ISBN: 0679740562 Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf Pub. Date: 01 May, 1992 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: The Simple Truth: Poems by Philip Levine, Harry Ford ISBN: 0679765840 Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf Pub. Date: 01 September, 1996 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: What Work Is: Poems by Philip Levine ISBN: 0679740589 Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf Pub. Date: 01 May, 1992 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop ISBN: 0374518173 Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux Pub. Date: 01 April, 1984 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey: Poems, 1991-1995 by Hayden Carruth ISBN: 1556591101 Publisher: Copper Canyon Press Pub. Date: 01 April, 1996 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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