Customer Reviews

The Mercy: Poems

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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.

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.

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..."

[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.

This was my first book by Philip Levine and I must say I was impressed. His poetry is strong, descriptive and makes many statements in innovative ways, this is almost fiction. As a newcommer to his style and skills I can only recommend this book as a good introduction to Levine.

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.

very nice boook that sente you very farrr from heart, and mages you dream

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.

One of the reasons Phil Levine's poetry has not only lasted, but indeed triumphed is his (com)passionate point of view and his willingness to not play games with his readers. To be sure, the undercurrents of Levine's poetry are deep and torrential, but that does not mean that accessability has to be sacrificed for complexity and beauty. I had thought that _Names of the Lost_ would always be my favorite collection of Levine's, but _The Mercy_ is just as compassionate, forgiving of human error, and concerned with the nobility of the sufferer as anything he has ever written...or anybody in recent times. The more Levine writes, the more beauty and complexity he seems to find in everyday lives. Both his and ours. (Geez this sounds like a stuffy jacket blurb doesn't it...good thing I really believe what I've written.)

Mr. Levine revisits some of his favorite subjects and settings -the machine shops and the ordinary neighborhoods of Detriot, among others. I dont want this review to sound like a jacket blurb, but anyone who loves Mr. Levine's rhythms, the powerful music his poetry makes, will be thrilled to read these poems. In poems such as "The New World," and the title poem, he gives us glimpses like few poets can of an America most of us have never known but need to be connected to. Of course, I read him to learn how to write.