The Mercy
Poems
Published on 7. September 2011
96 pages
978-0-307-55788-9 (ISBN)
Description
Philip Levine's new collection of poems (his first since The Simple Truth was awarded the Pulitzer Prize) is a book of journeys: the necessary ones that each of us takes from innocence to experience, from youth to age, from confusion to clarity, from sanity to madness and back again, from life to death, and occasionally from defeat to triumph. The book's mood is best captured in the closing lines of the title poem, which takes its name from the ship that brought the poet's mother to America: A nine-year-old girl travels all night by train with one suitcase and an orange. She learns that mercy is something you can eat again and again while the juice spills over your chin, you can wipe it away with the back of your hands and you can never get enough.
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Person
Philip Levine was born in 1928 in Detroit, where he was formally educated in the public schools and at Wayne University (now Wayne State University). After a succession of industrial jobs, he left the country before settling in Fresno, California, where he taught at the university there until his retirement. He has received many awards for his books of poems, most recently the National Book Award in 1991 for What Work Is, and the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for The Simple Truth.
Content
- Intro
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- I
- Smoke
- Flowering Midnight
- After Leviticus
- Drum
- Orphans
- The Communist Party
- And That Night Clifford Died
- The Three Crows
- Photography 2
- Reinventing America
- The Cafe
- Salt and Oil
- II
- Joe Gould's Pen
- The Search for Lorca's Shadow
- The Sea We Read About
- Sundays with Lungo
- The Unknowable
- I Caught a Glimpse
- Night Words
- Once
- Philosophy Lesson
- "He Would Never Use One Word Where None Would Do"
- The Mortal Words of Zweik
- Little Apple of My Eye
- III
- Clouds Above the Sea
- The New World
- After the War
- Black Stone on Top of Nothing
- The Dead
- The Evening Turned Its Back Upon Her Voice
- These Words
- Cesare
- It Was Autumn
- The Return
- Northern Motive
- The Mercy
- IV
- The Secret
- Notes
- A Note About the Author
- Other Books by This Author
