Selected Poems (review)

Reviews 109 to honor such work or to wonder at it. Far better this year than to give a hundred prizes to America's poets would be to take thirty minutes from our classes and read aloud some of these poems. GREG KUZMA Selected Poems by Philip Levine. New York: Atheneum, 1984. 234 pp. $9.95 (paper). After crossing the Ambassador Bridge and being questioned about what we were doing in Canada, we entered Detroit. After the verdant Ontario farms and the shabby respectability of Windsor, the screaming desperation of urban America startled us all over again. The overgrown vacant lots, the boarded windowless tenements, the people sitting listlessly on splintering wooden stoops, and the deeply rutted roads contrast forcefully with the neat farms of Ontario, the well-kept roadways. The river is a turbid, shitty brown; the air feels gritty and full of particulates. Maybe it is the Detroit River, so dirty and oily that it could burn or one could walk on it, that makes me think of Philip Levine, the only man who dared to make poetry of such a place. Selected Poems, the volume of Levine's poetry that draws from his past ten collections, recapitulates his career up to 1984. Reading Levine reveals both the change and continuity of a major poet. Even the earliest works from On the Edge contain some of his characteristic topics and attitudes. For example , in "Lights I Have Seen Before" we hear his Larkinesque use of the indefinite pronoun: I shave carefully, wanting to say something to someone, wanting to ease myself away from the face that is faintly familiar. He has already found the sinewy short line that he will continue to use to such advantage throughout his career. Also, a kind of ennui with the persistence of material objects which require our attention bespeaks the weary suburbanite: My next door neighbor sees me and waves as I pass and goes on chasing behind the power mower in a spray of grass and lights come on where I have seen them before. In a poem titled "My Poets" from the same early collection, we also find a concern for the place names of America: Toledo, Ohio, South Pasadena and Memphis. In a poem about a survivor of Hiroshima, "The Rose," the social concerns surface which will mount to a passionate outcry in Levine's later work: Some fled and some sat down. The river burned all that day and into the night, the stones sighed a moment and were still, and the shadow of a man's hand entered a leaf. 110 the minnesota review When we reach "A New Day" from his second volume, Not This Leg, we recognize the now familiar Detroit memories: I recall the Friday night In a beer garden in Detroit I saw him flatten Ezzard Charles on TV, and weep, and raise both gloved hands in a slow salute To a God. The Levine that engaged me when I first read his poetry twenty years ago emerges in these lines. He was not afraid to draw on his own mean and unglorious memories to make poetry. His great strength emerges here: his loyalty to his class background. This loyalty allows him to include without embarrassment the most mundane things into his poetic consciousness. In the Winter 1983-84 issue of Soviet Studies in Literature, Evgenii Evtushenko has written of the problem of narrowness that seems to plague many contemporary poets: If a writers' inmost world comprises only his most intimate experiences and all dse occurring in the world is not transformed into personal experience, then regardless of how talented he may be, he is doomed to narrowness. The breadth of a person's inmost world is an indication of the breadth of his talent. Sincerity in literature is not a matter of desire but an obligatory condition. The sincerity in Levine's work sounded at the start and strengthened subsequently; he refuses to renounce his own identity, nor does he romanticize it for our titillation. He finds the personal pressure points for public events. He writes about the muteness and isolation of professing poetry in America: And I, I am the silent...