The Simple Truth Poems

by LEVINE, PHILIP

• ISBN13: 9780679765844
• ISBN10: 0679765840
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-09-03
• Publisher: Knopf

Summary

Awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for 1995, Philip Levine goes from strength to strength, having received the National Book Ward for Poetry for his earlier book What Work Is. This is the first paperback edition of this text, about which Harold Bloom said, "The controlled pathos of every poem in the volume is immense, and gives me a new sense of Levine."

Author Biography

Philip Levine was born in 1928 in Detroit and was formally educated there, in the public schools and at Wayne University (now Wayne State University). After a succession of industrial jobs, he left the city for good and lived in various parts of the country before settling in Fresno, California, where he taught at the state university until his retirement. For twelve autumns he served as poet in residence at New York University. He has received many awards for his books of poems, including the National Book Award in 1991 for What Work Is and the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for The Simple Truth. In 2011 he was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States. He divides his time between Fresno, California, and Brooklyn, New York.

Table of Contents

On the Meeting of Garcia Lorca and Hart Crane	p. 3
Ode for Mrs. William Settle	p. 5
Lame Ducks, McKesson and Robbins, 1945	p. 7
February 14th	p. 9
One Day	p. 10
Ask for Nothing	p. 13
Soul	p. 14
The Trade	p. 16
Llanto	p. 18
In the Dark	p. 19
Magpiety	p. 20
The Poem of Chalk	p. 27
Dreaming in Swedish	p. 29
Out by Dark	p. 30
The Return	p. 32
Getting There	p. 33
Blue	p. 36
Blue and Blue	p. 37
Tristan	p. 39
Dust and Memory	p. 41
The Escape	p. 42
The Simple Truth	p. 44
No Buyers	p. 47
Winter Words, Manhattan	p. 49
My Sister's Voice	p. 51
The Old Testament	p. 52
Photography	p. 54
My Brother Abel, the Wounded	p. 56
Edward Lieberman, Entrepreneur, Four Years After the Burnings on Okinawa	p. 58
Listen Carefully	p. 59
The Spanish Lesson	p. 61
My Mother with Purse the Summer They Murdered the Spanish Poet	p. 63
My Father with Cigarette Twelve Years before the Nazis Could Break his Heart	p. 65
Notes	p. 69
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