Breath: Poems [Hardcover]

Philip Levine (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 7, 2004

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Though Levine's late-'60s poems (in They Feed They Lion) surprised everyone, by now his readers know what to expect. Levine writes gritty, fiercely unpretentious free verse about American manliness, physical labor, simple pleasures and profound grief, often set in working-class Detroit (where Levine grew up) or in central California (where he now resides), sometimes tinged with reference to his Jewish heritage or to the Spanish poets of rapt simplicity (Machado, Lorca) who remain his most visible influence. Levine's 18th book will neither disappoint his devotees nor silence the doubters. The simple lyric pleasures are still here, however colored with mortality: "I came to walk/ on the earth, still cold, still silent." Many poems memorialize, by name, men now dead whom Levine admired when young: Uncle Nate, Uncle Simon, "great-uncle Yenkl"; "Antonio, the baker"; Bernie whose "mother/ worked nights at Ford Rouge"; Joachim, who once fought for the Spanish Republic; young John, "coming home from the job at Chevy," "even at sixteen... a man waiting to enter/ a man's world, the one that would kill him." "Until he dies, a boy remains a boy," the sequence "Naming" states; often Levine contrasts his boyhood memories with his experience of old age, to serious effect. His poems of grief also form, as Levine says, "a silent chorus/ for all those we've left/ behind."
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From Booklist

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
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 96 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (September 7, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400042917
• ISBN-13: 978-1400042913
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,681,720 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Find Your Soul, April 3, 2005

By 

Carl Waluconis (Kirkland, WA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Breath: Poems (Hardcover)

Philip Levine does not have the recognition he deserves as the foremost poet in America writing in English. True, he has plenty of fine critics who praise him as they should, but his work somehow should be on everyone's lips more than it is. Breath has him still doing it like no one else. He elevates and makes elegiac the life of the working person - the life of maybe not everyone, but you and I.

I need to tell you about my relationship with Levine's poems. When I first read Levine's "Burned" (later to appear in What Work Is), it gave me a nightmare about my father that both terrified me and made me love my Father like I never had before. In fact, I made it back to Baltimore in time to plant a kiss on his dieing forehead, and I often think about that poem when I think about that moment.
It is true that I arranged Bukowski's second public reading ever and had it video-taped (as reported in the Chicago newspaper review of the video recording, Bukowski at Bellevue). Appearing in Hank's short story made his work play a part in my life, but nothing like Levine's work. His new book has poems that have the same kinds of power. They are about naming when naming is, in the words of the poems, "not enough". Philip Levine's words will always be with us. You do not have to go as far as I do and snap up a new book by him without even looking inside. However, you owe it to you or your soul to read Breath.

Carl Waluconis

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thanks, August 21, 2009

By 

a gentle sound (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Breath: Poems (Paperback)

Two year ago this was a present for my birthday.
This summer in my reading I re-read the slim volume. It takes me many readings of poetry sometimes to even like it, or connect to it, or re-welcome it back into thought.
In a way this book functioned this way. For one thing if I tell you when you are distracted a story say about a person I loved deeply, say Freda perhaps you might listen. Maybe. She was older, neighbor, shaped my life but I have to have an ability to build her before your eyes. And I have to discern things like her azaleas, her regalness, to catch her and catch you. Then I have to hope you are listening. Simple I suppose. I think if I repeat to you stories of her, or repeat that story eventually if we are talking, if we care, if I can hold your attentions then you come to a place where a little that honor I have of her maybe takes on a little place for you. Or it might. Or it might trigger a similar memory of your Freda. We have the halls of memory open to pass within.

So this book walks me there. Many times over I've read this noticing I did my hearing within a different poem. Today what caught me wasn't what I noticed yesterday. Sometimes I was impatient or unable to follow, other times held by this great phrase or image. Or person poured out. But it is true that I do see the pieces as speaking back over a life, like we might in intimate conversation wish to be heard, talking to figures ordinary, extrodinary. I think it's a book with a heartbeat.

There are poems I really like here.

My daughter's ill with Mono, I'm returning to teaching, I feel the sting of certain things sometimes not immune to points even on a silly site like this that raise and plummet thousands over nothing I can figure, not immune to friends that friend and those whose silence grows, aware of critical comment within critical comment within failings. But given that diving board I still leap off vainly into offering up words and thoughts, suggestions and creative attempts to catch and frame and draw attention to books or things I like. Rather funny if you do so in the dark or to a chorus of distrust. Still...I like Breath. I think if you struggle with older poets, self reflection, with thinking another's life and experience have worth, if you don't like backwards glancing, memory, memorials, the shifts of memory this might not be for you, no.

I liked this poem.
Home For The Holidays

Does anyone give a sh/t? Not
I said the little brown mouse
And so to bed, said Mother,
but no one was listening.
Praise the Lord, said the radio,
the radio said Praise the Lord
again, and the television
turned its back on the room.

Turnips for wisdom, eggplant
for beauty, parsnips for ease,
cabbage for size, a raw egg
for the hair, a slice of ham
to seize the hips, for the nose
foxglove and salt, for grace
ice-cold water poured from
way high up to way down low.

Everyone sits at the big table
in the dark. The empty plates
moon, the silverware stars,
the napkins scrub their hands.
I'm home, says the front door.
The windows are deep in thought,
the roof has taken off its hat.
Nothing to do, chants the toilet.
from page 34

I personally like the ice-water scene.
It was the beginning of an interesting conversation, this book, one we are still having.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Auto Pilot, September 6, 2006

By 

turn of phrase (san diego) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Breath: Poems (Hardcover)

I have admired Mr. Levine's work for years, have been to numerous readings. Perhaps only Wright and Dickey match his ability to turn the lyrical moment from the straight-ahead narrative. But I must be honest and write that he has, especially since "The Simple Truth," been turning the same styllistic moves and strategies over and over, to the point that his poetry has become a character sketch of the poet rather than the poet's illumination of his world. How many poems, for instance, must begin or be moved by adverb phrases? How many poems about the same subject matter? (Sharon Olds fell victim to the repetative theme about 10 years ago)