The Mercy: Poems [Hardcover]

Philip Levine (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 30, 1999

Philip Levine's new collection of poems (his first since The Simple Truth was awarded the Pulitzer Prize) is a book of journeys: the necessary ones that each of us takes from innocence to experience, from youth to age, from confusion to clarity, from sanity to madness and back again, from life to death, and occasionally from defeat to triumph. The book's mood is best captured in the closing lines of the title poem, which takes its name from the ship that brought the poet's mother to America:

                 A nine-year-old girl travels
all night by train with one suitcase and an orange.
She learns that mercy is something you can eat
again and again while the juice spills over
your chin, you can wipe it away with the back
of your hands and you can never get enough.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Over the last four decades, Philip Levine has earned a reputation as America's consummate blue-collar bard--a kind of postindustrial Walt Whitman, albeit one with a taste for surrealism and bebop. To a degree, of course, this is an accurate picture. Levine has written about the working life with a hard-nosed clarity and tenderness that few American poets can match: it's no accident that his pivotal 1991 collection was called What Work Is. Still, his penchant for lunch-bucket lyricism has tended to overshadow his other gifts, of which there are many. For starters, Levine is a superb elegiac poet. His imaginative engagement with the past enlivened almost every line in The Simple Truth, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994. And his 17th collection, The Mercy, entails a similar search for lost time--even as it demonstrates the mournful, memorializing power of language itself.

In the first part of The Mercy, Levine mostly re-creates the Detroit factories, machine shops, and neighborhoods of his youth. Here are the "six bakeries, four barber shops, a five and dime, / twenty beer gardens, a Catholic church with a shul / next door where we studied the Talmud-Torah." Whether these were the good or bad old days depends, needless to say, on your point of view. But Levine seldom overlooks the pitfalls of what he calls "merely village life, / exactly what our parents left in Europe / brought to American with pure fidelity." Elsewhere he celebrates his predecessors (Federico García Lorca, César Vallejo, Charlie Parker) and contemporaries (most notably Sonny Rollins, in "The Unknowable"). In every case the poet squeezes the maximum music out of his compact, unfussy lines. He also has a genius for imparting meaning, and even grandeur, to the trashiest particulars. Note his take on one piece of industrial detritus in "Drum":

On the galvanized tin roof the tunes of sudden rain.
The slow light of Friday morning in Michigan,
the one we waited for, shows seven hills
of scraped earth topped with crab grass,
weeds, a black oil drum empty, glistening
at the exact center of the modern world.

Who but Levine would have nudged this empty (but resonant!) receptacle to stage center? This must be what they mean by poetic reclamation--in every sense of the word. --James Marcus

From Publishers Weekly

"Work was something that thrived on fire, that without/ fire couldn't catch its breath or hang on for life," Levine recalls of the working-class Detroit of his childhood. This 18th collection continues a career-long project of lending permanence to modern, work-governed life. Typically, Levine tirelessly uncovers "the daily round of the world,/ three young men in dirty work clothes/ on their way under a halo/ of torn clouds and famished city birds," slightly tempering a bitter reality with the steady, romantic presence of "the wind/ bringing hope in the morning/ and carrying off our exhaust / as the light goes each evening." The result is an inclusive archive of American experience sympathetically human, dramatized in his signature persona poems like "After Leviticus" and "The Evening Turned Its Back Upon Her Voice," which infuse fleeting things ("the few pale tulips and irises"; "salami cut so thin/ the light shone through the slices") with the power to shape self-awareness. While he shares with James Wright the rare ability to honor the dignity of human labor, this volume, more than the last two (The Simple Truth; What Work Is), does so to the near banishment of much else?compelling phrasing, avoidance of the trite. There is some respite, however, at the volume's end, where an account of his mother's ocean journey to America on "The Mercy" is followed by her private funeral, in "The Secret": "you weren't/ there as you're not in this haze,/ nor in the first evening breeze."
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 96 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (March 30, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375401385
• ISBN-13: 978-0375401381
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,029,935 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars There are poems here that will stay with you, June 7, 2000

By 

John Boddie - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Mercy: Poems (Hardcover)

When I started reading, I was disappointed. It's not that the first few poems were bad, but they revisited themes that Mr. Levine had already done well. Detroit was still smoke filled, growing up was clumsy - even if youth passed to quickly, small things made a difference. It seemed that this book was going to be What Work Is - Part II.

And then I read "Salt and Oil" and then "The Sea We Read About" and "The Unknowable." Wow! Incredible writing. I just sat and looked at the page, not even considering that there were other poems I had not yet read. I wanted to let each of them sink in and take root before letting go. I would have paid three times the price for these, and there are more like them. The images are haunting and the Levine's art becomes increasingly impressive with each reading.

What stays with you is the empathy. Philip Levine's feeling for his subject goes beyond astute observation and penetrates to the heart of the subject. There is a respect for the people and places he writes about. There is a recurring dignity to his subjects.

Philip Levine shows what it means to carry an American voice in modern poetry. It's a voice worth hearing, and the echoes will stay with you.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Levine at his Most Pleasurable, November 10, 2000

By 

Gianmarco Manzione (Tampa, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Mercy: Poems (Hardcover)

Recently I had the pleasure to attend a Philip Levine reading in New York City. Like most of our lauded poets, he drowned the audience in a forcible modesty, at one point saying that he is only thought of as a worker's poet, but he's "really not." Well, whether that is just another artist's malevolence towards critics of the day or honest sentiment, The Mercy seems to back him up.

Unlike past masterpieces such as "Names of the Lost" or "What Work Is," The Mercy indulges in an extra dollop of jazz poems, such as the eulogy to the great Sonny Rollins, feeding his horn with breath on Manhattan's Williamsburg Bridge, breath that "became the music of the world," as Levine puts it in one of The Mercy's best poems, "The Unknowing." Of course, this collection offers Levine's typically brilliant working poems, such as the first poem, "Smoke." "Why/ was the air filled with smoke?" Levine writes, "Simple. We had work/Work was something that thrived on fire, that without/ fire couldn't catch its breath or hang on for life."

But there is yet a third dimension to Levine that surfaces here, an element of playfulness, of constructing the poems as conversations between speaker and reader, such as on the just-mentioned poem, in which he speaks of smoke in the first stanza and drifts off onto something of a tangent, and as if his ear were not just tuned to the cadence of his own poem but also to the reader's mind, he writes, "Go back to the beginning, you insist." And he does. Other times, it is as if Levine were writing about writing, almost mocking his chosen art, as on poems such as "Clouds Above the Sea," a poem about his parents standing side by side, "I could give her a rope of genuine pearls/as a gift for bearing my father's sons/ and let each pearl glow with a child's fire/ I could turn her toward you now with a smile/ so that we might joy in her constancy."

This sort of teasing propells these poems to the heights of tragicomedy, as most poems are deeply rooted in the heavy world of tragic characters that pervade most of Levine's work. Only this time, any element of mawkishness has evaporated, and we get a curious blend of laughs and sighs leaping from each page. Perhaps this is The mercy's most impressive facet; that now in his early seventies and after forty years worth of books, Philip Levine's poetry continues to evolve.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Fact is silence is the perfect water", September 27, 2005

By 

Janee J. Baugher (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Mercy: Poems (Paperback)

This book of narrative poetry is divided into four sections. Most notable in this collection is Levine's presupposing his readers. In the first poem, the speaker asks, "Can you imagine the air filled with-smoke?/ It was." The first ten lines of Salt and Oil really sum-up how Levine skillfully envisions his audience. In this piece, three men are introduced, the narrator calls one Salt and the other Oil. Levine withholds naming the third man and writes: "'The third man,' you ask, `who was the third man in the photograph?' There is no/ photograph, no mystery./ Only Salt and Oil..." He uses this device in many other poems, and uses it very effectively. Again, in Cesare, Levine manipulates the reader by painting a portrait of this friend, Cesare and then Levine shocks the reader with, "of course I never knew any Cesare..." And in case the reader skimmed over that, he rephrases it in the next line, "he died before I left Detroit, before/ I had a chance..." And if the reader is still confused/incredulous, Levine says it once more, "I'm really talking/ about someone else I can't name..." Strangely enough, as the reader, I wasn't off-put by this - Levine had such a gentle, trustworthy voice that I was willing to follow. How interesting: his persuasiveness and my willingness!

Levine's an alert man who listens, waits, and writes-of it. These pieces have vivid, concrete language but, unfortunately, with little imagery. In the poem The Sea We Read About, the reader finds the metaphysical, symbolic, and allegorical. I was carried by lines like, "...the sea spread out, limitless and changing/ everything, and that I would get there some day." Oh, that elusive "there," that long-away "some day." In poems like these, Levine speaks to the collective psyche.

Levine has some lovely moments and surprising, poetic diction, like this from Caught a Glimpse: "The moment is so full/ I have to close my eyes..." And from the poem, Night Words, "...snow gathers/ on their shoulders and scalds their ungloved hands." He touches on an intriguing concept here: let's dream today of our literal future as if we're self-soothsayers while we dream. Also in The Dead there's a particularly wonderful image: "he scurried off, the oranges/ tumbling out of the dark sack, one/ after another, a short bright trail/ left on the sidewalk..." Another beautiful moment can be found in the last two stanzas of The Evening, this idea of "...leafing through the great book of days." I won't call Levine a man of great poetics, but I will refer to him as a man with poetics of great meaning.

However, I have two qualms with this book. In many of Levine's poems, he tends to end with the expository; a lot of these stanzas just feel like summations and don't necessarily push the theme (e.g. The Unknowable, Philosophy Lesson, The Mercy). Secondly, Levine has a consistent form he uses throughout: a single stanza, longish line poem which usually runs a full page. This form was fine for most of the pieces. But what about the poems which beg a shorter line and shorter length? For example, He Would Never Use One Word Where None Would Do seems to contradict itself in its context, as compared to its form. Form usually follows function for maximum impact (unless, of course, there's tension in the way form is used in a contrary fashion). Specifically, this poem expands on the uselessness of over-talk; it's a poem about silence but without much silence itself. I would expect a poem on wordiness to be less wordy. One thing that Levine does do right in this poem is introducing this lovely, curious metaphor: "Fact is silence is the perfect water..."