The Simple Truth: Poems [Paperback]

Philip Levine (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 3, 1996

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1995
 
Written in a voice that moves between elegy and prayer, The Simple Truth contains thirty-three poems whose aim is to weave a complex tapestry of myth, history (both public and private), family, memory, and invention in a search for truths so basic and universal they often escape us all.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Philip Levine's 15th collection of poetry muses on the past--everything from friends lost, decisions made and potatoes eaten is remembered and considered. With humor and strikingly modest wisdom, Levine mingles realism and romanticism, producing fascinating, emotionally persuasive shifts and tonal modulations that epitomize a lived truth. As he laments his losses, he is also stoic, bending to acknowledge the misfortunes of others in total sympathy. The Simple Truth was the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1995. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Levine's third book of new verse in six years offers further proof that since turning 60 his drive to explain his relationship to the world has never been stronger. For him, experience and knowledge are not given but are almost consciously wrested from life ("I'm an American,/even before I was fourteen I knew I would have/to create myself"). Though the usual touchstones of his work-adolescence in the 1940s, the death of Garcia Lorca, Detroit's industrial landscape-are ever present, this collection is more consistently narrative and elegiac than previous ones, elevating the minutiae of personal remembrance to an almost mythic significance, which in turn gives way to the larger permanence and mystery of existence as represented by night sky vistas and the forces of history. Levine (New Selected Poems, LJ 6/15/91) has been so much imitated that his diction and style are now the standard for much current mainstream poetry; thus, his work sometimes seems all too familiar, but few readers will fail to be moved by its earnest effort to reconcile life as lived both outside and inside the mind. Recommended for poetry collections.
Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, N.Y.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (September 3, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679765840
• ISBN-13: 978-0679765844
• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 0.3 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #86,630 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Mr. Levine's Simple Truth August 2, 2001

By Robin Friedman HALL OF FAMETOP 50 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

Philip Levine writes in the title poem of this collection:

"Some things/you know all your life. They are so simple and true/they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,/they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,/the glass of water, the absence of light gathering/ in the shadows of picture frames, they must be/ naked and alone, they must stand for themselves."

These lines capture many of the themes of this Pulitzer-prize winning book. The poems in this collection are deceptively simple, "naked and alone". They generally involve an incident or person, recollected by the poet from his past. The incident is recounted in bare unrhymed lines, without hyperbole or judgment. We are encouraged to see the incident, as we see the still life reproduced on the cover of the volume and to let it "stand for itself". The poems are elegaic in tone and the effect of the memory is generally one of deep sadness.

Many of the poems have a deliberately pictorial quality, as reflected in their titles, that remind one of a photo or of a painting in a museum. In many cases, the reader is tempted to conceive in the mind's eye a painting to accompany the poem. This is true, particularly, as the book progresses into its final section with its descriptions of the poet's mother ("My Mother with Purse, the Summer they Murdered the Spanish Poet"), father ("My Father with Cigarette Twelve Years before the Nazis could Break his Heart"), and others ("Edward Lieberman, Entrepreneur, four years after the Burnings on Okinawa") One of the poems of the collection is title simply "Photography". Ironically, this poem is less pictorial than many others. It relates a sad incident from the poet's childhood involving his Aunt, and others, and focuses on the ravages of time and memory.

The poems also focus on the role imagination plays in constituting our reality. The first poem of the collection "On the Meeting of Garcia Lorca and Hart Crane" relates a meeting between these two romantic 20th Century poets and alludes to Crane's apparent suicide in jumping from a ship bound from Vera Cruz to New York. Crane's tragic but romantic death is juxtaposed with the vision coming "to an ordinary man staring/ at a filthy river" as he contemplates not only Crane and Lorca but his son falling to his death "from/the roof of a building he works on." With a voice of irony, the poet asks us to "bless the imagination. It gives/ us the myths we live by. Let's bless/ the visionary power of the human-- the only animal that's got it--"

These poems have a multi-layered simplicity realized through an understated voice of sadness and illuminated by imagination.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars He writes plain, about things plain, and is plain fabulous! October 3, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

Philip Levine once vowed to be the voice of the poor, the simple, those without voice--a vow he has not broken in his sixty-plus years of writing poetry. In 1995, Levine was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his collection of poems, "the Simple Truth". That prize would mean less to him than the knowledge that thousands of people have found enjoyment and comfort from reading his poems--that from his work, they came to better understand our common vulnerabilty to the state of being human. Levine's poems are an echo of the emotions trapped in the reader's heart; they are a friendly voice giving substance to what has been lived, but not spoken. Levine's title poem "The Simple Truth" invites the reader to recognize and celebrate the stark beauty of simple things. Each poem in this collection builds on the other to introduce the reader to the poet, who in turn introduces readers to perfect poetic expression, so personal that they will stop and say "Yes!! That IS how it is!" Anyone who cannot relate to or reconginze themself in at least half of the poems in this fine book, have not read it. That's "the simple truth."

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful book May 20, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

Levine's poetry often moves me. In my opinion, this is his best book. His poems strike me as being very honest; they make me accept the complicated mess of joys and disappointments that it means to be human. The title poem, "The Simple Truth," explains exactly what I mean (and in a better way than I'm doing here). Please read this book.