Breath Poems

by LEVINE, PHILIP

• ISBN13: 9780375710780
• ISBN10: 0375710787
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-01-17
• Publisher: Knopf

Summary

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 songDinah 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. From the Hardcover edition.

Author Biography

Philip Levine is the author of sixteen collections of poems and two books of essays. He has received many awards for his poetry, including the National Book Award in 1980 for Ashes and again in 1991 for What Work Is, and the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for The Simple Truth. He divides his time between Brooklyn, New York, and Fresno, California.

Philip Levine’s The Mercy, New Selected Poems, The Simple Truth, and What Work Is are available in Knopf paperback.


From the Hardcover edition.

Table of Contents

I
Gospel	3	(1)
Praise	4	(2)
Storms	6	(2)
The Great Truth	8	(2)
On 52nd Street	10	(2)
Moradian	12	(2)
The West Wind	14	(1)
Keats in California	15	(2)
Today and Two Thousand Years from Now	17	(2)
The Two	19	(4)
II
My Brother, Antonio, the Baker	23	(2)
Our Reds	25	(2)
A View of Home	27	(1)
The Lesson	28	(2)
Dutch Treat	30	(2)
The Esquire	32	(2)
Home for the Holidays	34	(1)
Breakfasts with Joachim	35	(2)
For a Duro	37	(1)
Houses in Order	38	(1)
Dust	39	(8)
III
Naming	47	(16)
IV
1/1/2000	63	(2)
Yenkl	65	(2)
My Father in the Wind	67	(2)
The Invention of the Fado	69	(2)
When the Shift Was Over	71	(1)
On a Photograph of Simon Karaday	72	(3)
My Given Name	75	(1)
The Genius	76	(2)
Call It Music	78	(3)
Notes	81

Excerpts

The Lesson

Early in the final industrial century
on the street where I was born lived
a doctor who smoked black shag
and walked his dog each morning
as he muttered to himself in a language
only the dog knew. The doctor had saved
my brother’s life, the story went, reached
two stained fingers down his throat
to extract a chicken bone and then
bowed to kiss the ring--encrusted hand
of my beautiful mother, a young widow
on the lookout for a professional.
Years before, before the invention of smog,
before Fluid Drive, the eight-hour day,
the iron lung, I'd come into the world
in a shower of industrial filth raining
from the bruised sky above Detroit.
Time did not stop. Mother married
a bland wizard in clutch plates
and drive shafts. My uncles went off
to their world wars, and I began a career
in root vegetables. Each morning,
just as the dark expired, the corner church
tolled its bells. Beyond the church
an oily river ran both day and night
and there along its banks I first conversed
with the doctor and Waldo, his dog.
"Young man," he said in words
resembling English, "you would dress
heavy for autumn, scarf, hat, gloves.
Not to smoke," he added, "as I do."
Eleven, small for my age but ambitious,
I took whatever good advice I got,
though I knew then what I know
now: the past, not the future, was mine.
If I told you he and I became pals
even though I barely understood him,
would you doubt me? Wakened before dawn
by Catholic bells, I would dress
in the dark -- remembering scarf, hat, gloves --
to make my way into the deserted streets
to where Waldo and his master ambled
the riverbank. Sixty-four years ago,
and each morning is frozen in memory,
each a lesson in what was to come.
What was to come? you ask. This world
as we have it, utterly unknowable,
utterly unacceptable, utterly unlovable,
the world we waken to each day
with or without bells. The lesson was
in his hands, one holding a cigarette,
the other buried in blond dog fur, and in
his words thick with laughter, hushed,
incomprehensible, words that were sound
only without sense, just as these must be.
Staring into the moist eyes of my maestro,
I heard the lost voices of creation running
over stones as the last darkness sifted upward,
voices saddened by the milky residue
of machine shops and spangled with first light,
discordant, harsh, but voices nonetheless.


From the Hardcover edition.

---

Excerpted from Breath: Poems by Philip Levine
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.