News of the World by Philip Levine / Review

 

NEWS OF THE WORLD

by Philip Levine

Reviewed by Chard deNiord

Published on March 18, 2013

For nearly sixty years, Philip Levine has been praising the famous men and women of the Detroit auto industry, as well as a wide range of unsung others, including relatives, jazz musicians, adolescent lovers, moguls, fellow poets, martyrs, and schoolmates. While Levine’s lucid, declarative voice resonates throughout all twenty of his books of poetry, agreeing at every turn with Emily Dickinson’s claim that “Drama’s Vitallest Expression is the Common Day / That arise and set about Us,” his compassion leads him repeatedly to identify both tenderly and self-effacingly with others. Few other poets of his generation, with the exception of James Wright, have woven lyrical expression into demotic narratives with a comparably deft hand and persevering vision of the downtrodden and disenfranchised.

In his new book, News of the World, Levine complements this strategy with metaphysical intimations. By frequently invoking silence at the end of his poems, Levine continues to report everyday news, while also intoning intimations of the ineffable.

If he came

To my door now on his trek
To nowhere I’d welcome him back
With black wine and black bread,
A glass of tea, a hard wood floor
To sleep on, and hope the new day
Brought him the music of silence.

(from “Yakov”)

… the sea taught you
and you taught me:
the sea goes out
and nothing comes back.

(from “My Fathers, The Baltics”)

Now you say this is home,
so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust,
wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it life.

(from “Our Valley”)

As in his previous nineteen books, Levine leads his reader in News of the World through the purlieus and hubs of his old haunts—Detroit, Manhattan, Havana, Barcelona, Lisbon, Philadelphia, and Dearborn, showing and telling the news of ordinary men and women, such as the Cuban lieutenant’s blind devotion to Hemingway in “The White City,” or the husband’s ironic happiness in prison in “Not Worth The Wait.” In addition to his mostly short-lined verse poems, Levine includes a fascinating eight-page section of prose poems. While less lyrical than his verse poems, they facilitate a more straightforward reportage of his poetic news. With little irritable reaching after his subjects and a limpid verse style, Levine allows simple, memorable truths to emerge naturally from his poetic storytelling. He has honed his narrative expression, employing speakers who keep an objective distance from both themselves and their subjects. Such distance makes for a kind of double accounting in which Levine’s witness becomes a fascinating combination of no-nonsense observer and incisive commentator.

In this latest book, which Levine claims took a long time to cohere, he takes a bold new step in addressing the mystery of his voice head-on. In his remarkable poem “Two Voices,” he concludes with this apostrophe to an unspecified other who could easily be his reader:

Let’s say I phone you tonight and tell you
my little adventure which came to nothing.
What will you think? Not what will you say,
you’ll say it was an illusion or you’ll say
there was a deep need in me to hear
that particular voice, or sometimes the voices
of the air—all the separate voices in so
public a place—can unite for a moment
to produce “Philip” or “John” or “Robert”
or whatever we expect. I don’t know
what you’ll think. I’ve never known, even
when you and I were together, and I’d
waken in the false dawn to hear you
in the secret voice that was yours crying
out into the dark a name not mine.

It’s in just this self-effacement and unknowing that Levine ironically finds what he earlier in the poem refers to as the disembodied “huge voice, deep and resonant”—the same voice that humbles itself before the “the music of silence” and, in so doing, discovers what Wallace Stevens called “the voice that is great within us.”

HARVARD REVIEW

Philip Levine / Something Has Fallen

Hand
 by Jean-Baptiste Huynh

Something Has Fallen

by Philip Levine

Something has fallen wordlessly

and holds still on the black driveway.

You find it, like a jewel,

among the empty bottles and cans

where the dogs toppled the garbage.

You pick it up, not sure

if it is stone or wood

or some new plastic made

to replace them both.

When you raise your sunglasses

to see exactly what you have

you see it is only a shadow

that has darkened your fingers,

a black ink or oil,

and your hand suddenly smells

of classrooms when the rain

pounded the windows and you

shuddered thinking of the cold

and the walk back to an empty house.

You smell all of your childhood,

the damp bed you struggled from

to dress in half-light and go out

into a world that never tired.

Later, your hand thickened and flat

slid out of a rubber glove,

as you stood, your mask raised,

to light a cigarette and rest

while the acid tanks that were

yours to clean went on bathing

the arteries of broken sinks.

Remember, you were afraid

of the great hissing jugs.

There were stories of burnings,

of flesh shredded to lace.

On other nights men spoke

of rats as big as dogs.

Women spoke of men

who trapped them in corners.

Always there was grease that hid

the faces of worn faucets, grease

that had to be eaten one

finger-print at a time,

there was oil, paint, blood,

your own blood sliding across

your nose and running over

your lips with that bright, certain

taste that was neither earth

or air, and there was air,

the darkest element of all,

falling all night

into the bruised river

you slept beside, falling

into the glass of water

you filled two times for breakfast

and the eyes you turned upward

to see what time it was.

Air that stained everything

with its millions of small deaths,

that turned all five fingers

to grease or black ink or ashes.