What Work Is [Paperback]

Philip Levine (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

If there is such a thing as a working man's poet, then Philip Levine is it. Born into a blue-collar family in Detroit, Levine grew up amidst the steel mills and auto factories of Motor City. Laboring in the plants radicalized both Levine's politics and his art; in early works such as On the Edge and Not This Pig, he explored the gritty despair of urban working-class life, a reality that has continued to run through his later poetry as well. In his 1991 National Book Award-winning What Work Is, Levine revisits the scenes of his youth--only now the factories are shut down, the towns that depended on them devastated. In the title poem, Levine conveys a multitude of meaning in the single image of men standing in line waiting for work:

the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, "No,
we're not hiring today," for any
reason he wants.

Factory workers aren't the only subjects here, however; in "Among Children" (an American response to Yeats's "Among School Children") Levine contemplates "the children of Flint, their fathers / work at the spark plug factory or truck / bottled water in 5 gallon sea-blue jugs / to the widows of the suburbs." For these children, he contends, the Book of Job would be the most appropriate reading.

What work is, Levine tells us, is the accretion of a lifetime of experiences, compromises, and disappointments. It is drinking gin for the first time at 14, a premature leap into manhood; it is that first job with its double-edged promise of a "new life of working and earning," and later the unrealized dreams of escaping that life. Levine's poems move back and forth in time, touch on issues of race, religion, education--even gardening--and leave the reader with a moving portrait of working-class life from the 1940s to the present day. --Alix Wilber

From Library Journal

This collection amounts to a hymn of praise for all the workers of America. These proletarian heroes, with names like Lonnie, Loo, Sweet Pea, and Packy, work the furnaces, forges, slag heaps, assembly lines, and loading docks at places with unglamorous names like Brass Craft or Feinberg and Breslin's First-Rate Plumbing and Plating. Only Studs Terkel's Working ( LJ 3/1/74) approaches the pathos and beauty of this book. But Levine's characters are also significant for their inner lives, not merely their jobs. They are unusually artistic, living "at the borders of dreams." One reads The Tempest "slowly to himself"; another ponders a diagonal chalk line drawn by his teacher to suggest a triangle, the roof of a barn, or the mysterious separation of "the dark from the dark." Issued simultaneously by the publisher with New Selected Poems , What Work Is ranks as a major work by a major poet. It is very accessible and utterly American in tone and language. Highly recommended for all poetry collections, large and small.
- Daniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, Ill.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (April 21, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679740589
• ISBN-13: 978-0679740582
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #109,779 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars American Toughness, July 2, 2001

By	Robin Friedman (Washington, D.C. United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: What Work Is (Paperback)

It is sad that we in the United States do not appreciate the strength and the variety of the poetry that our country has produced. A major instance of a contemporary poet whose writing deserves attention from a wider readership is Philip Levine. His book, "What Work Is" won the National Book Award for poetry in 1991. He has produced an impressive quantity of poetry which, in its very restraint and poignancy, can help bring meaning to people.

This is a short collection, consisting of four untitled sections. Section III consists of a single extended poem, "Burning" which is broadly autobiographical in character. The remaining three sections consist of a number of short poems with essentially two themes: the lives of the working poor prior to WWII and Levine's experiences as a boy growing up in Detroit. The poems with these themes overlap and are interspersed throughout the book with the earlier sections emphasizing vignettes of individuals doing the ordinary, desultory jobs that are the lot of most of us (such as "Coming Close", "Fire", "Every Blessed Day" and "What Work Is") while the latter section emphasizes Levine's Detroit experiences, the toughness of being a kid, his relationship with his brother, his love of boxing, and his exposure to Anti-Semitism. ("Coming of Age in Michigan", "The Right Cross", "The Sweetness of Bobby Hefka" "On the River".)

The poems are lucidly written with understatement and a lack of sentimentality which underscores the emotions and the passions they contain. It might be useful to compare these poems to the work of three other writers.

First, the poems reminded me of Walt Whitman, in their compassion for an attempt to understand the American worker. They lack Whitman's bravura and optimism, however, and content themselves with painting harshness and with emphasizing the tenacity people need to get by.

A writer with somewhat similar themes to Levine is the under-appreciated Victorian novelist, George Gissing in his books of lower class life in Victorian London such as The Nether World. Levine has a similar sort of attraction to the life of the poor, the unsuccessful and the down and out. He has at once a sympathy for his characters and a distance from them that Gissing seems to lack, for all his portrayals and descriptions.

A third writer is the late poet-nnovelist Charles Bukowski, a favorite of "underground" readers. Bukowski writes of ne'r do wells, prostitutes, and drunkards, -- as well as doing a lot of writing about himself. Levine has some of the same attraction to the scorned of society, but his people are the working poor, and their stories are told with restraint and dignity, unlike those of Bukowski, and also unlike the work of Bukowski, with literary skill and grace.

This is a book of poetry that has both the sadness and the grittiness of life and the toughness to understand and surmount it.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Levine's life work at last just is, September 30, 1997

By	[e-mail] (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: What Work Is (Paperback)

A devotion of Levine's life's work, the world of work, at last becomes one of his book's true focus and shows Levine, one of our greatest living poets, at his best. The controlled lyricism of his narratives hone in with precision, as when he pulls in on a woman's forearm at work, a minute detail in a vast world of labor to show us the universality of a struggle Levine himself has endured. While not every poem lives in the factories and workplaces, the fundamental aspect of work in our lives manifests itself in each piece. The short lines and continual enjambment gives his stanzas both the feel and appearence of quality reportage and yet are infused with an empathy and passion for his subjects that both moves and educates. This is the democratization of poetry that Wordsworth aspired to and Whitman acheived. Levine carries on in that tradtion and concretizes, with this book, his place among those American poets to be read in the next century.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Powerful reflections on the most defining experiences of our lives, October 4, 2008

By	Jeremy Gregg - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: What Work Is (Paperback)

Philip Levine's "What Work Is" represents one of the most powerful reflections on labor in modern American history, comparable to some of the great Walt Whitman's own compositions on the lives of those defined by the sweat of their brow and the strain in their backs.

Levine's words are at once intensely emotional while also tightly crafted with the elegant precision of a jeweler. Each piece dignifies its subject with a timeless quality that manages to avoid the sentimentality of similar attempts to ennoble the working poor.

One of the greatest accomplishment of the book is Levine's ability to structure complex meditations with a language that suits his subjects; each piece challenges its reader to dig into the text with the same shoulder-to-the-wheel dedication of those described in each poem.

"What Works Is" is a book best suited to those who desire a permanent addition to their library worthy of reconsidering every few years, for it is a piece that rewards those who accept its challenge to pore over each poem with the tenacity of a farmer in a field or a lumberjack in the forest. The deepest beauty of Levine's poetry is revealed in the third and fourth reading, after the reader himself has unwrapped the words in the joyful labor of discovering what work is.