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The Last Shift

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The Last Shift

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Overview

The final collection of new poems from one of our finest and most beloved poets.

The poems in this wonderful collection touch all of the events and places that meant the most to Philip Levine. There are lyrical poems about his family and childhood, the magic of nighttime and the power of dreaming; tough poems about the heavy shift work at Detroit's auto plants, the Nazis, and bosses of all kinds; telling poems about his heroes--jazz players, artists, and working people of every description, even children. Other poems celebrate places and things he loved: the gifts of winter, dawn, a wall in Naples, an English hilltop, Andalusia. And he makes peace with Detroit: "Slow learner that I am, it took me one night/to discover that rain in New York City/is just like rain in Detroit. It gets you wet." It is a peace that comes to full fruition in a moving goodbye to his home town in the final poem in the collection, "The Last Shift."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780451493286
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/08/2016
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	759 KB

About the Author

PHILIP LEVINE was born in 1928 in Detroit and attended 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. He was the author of nineteen previous collections of poetry and was the recipient of two National Book Awards and the Pulitzer Prize, among many other honors. He was poet laureate from 2011 until 2012, and served twelve autumns as poet-in-residence at New York University. He died in February 2015.

Hometown:

Fresno, California

Date of Birth:

January 10, 1928

Place of Birth:

Detroit, Michigan

Education:

B.A., Wayne State University; M.F.A., Iowa Writers Workshop, University of Iowa

Foreword Edward Hirsch vii

Inheritance 3

My Brother, the Artist, at Seven 5

Your Turn 6

1934 7

Leaves 9

The Absent Gardener 11

History 12

Assembly 13

Tail Tales 14

Pennsylvania Pastoral 15

Office Hours 16

More Than You Gave 17

The Future 21

Immortal Birds 27

I Was Married on the Fiftieth Birthday of Pablo Neruda 28

South 29

The Privilege of Power 30

A Wall in Naples and Nothing More 31

Sicilian Voices 32

Anatole 34

Albion 36

The Gatekeeper's Children 38

Nightship 39

In Another Country 40

By the Waters of the Llobregat 42

III

A Dozen Dawn Songs, Plus One 47

Urban Myths 52

Rain in Winter 55

The Angel Bernard 56

Godspell 58

Froggy Frenchman 59

Louie Lies 61

Zero for Conduct 63

The Gift of Winter 65

A Home Away 67

Postcards 68

Turkeys 70

How to Get There 73

The Last Shift 76

Acknowledgments 79

From the B&N Reads Blog

Page 1 of

Editorial Reviews

10/17/2016
In this posthumous collection of new poems, Levine (News of the World) extends the content of his American working-class poetics both to look back at his past and to push himself to reckon with the future. Hirsch, who organized and titled the book, writes in his foreword that Levine (1928–2015) “was a poet of the night shift, a late, ironic Whitman of our industrial heartland, and his life’s work is a long assault on isolation, an ongoing struggle against the enclosures of suffering.” Hardships, joys, and stories of old friends and the assembly floor make up the bulk of this book: “8 a.m. and we punch out/ and leave the place to our betters,/ the day shift jokers who think/ they’re in for fun,” but throughout, Levine takes moments to recenter before projecting forward: “The wind kept prodding/ at my back as though determined/ to push me away from where I was/ fearful, perhaps, I would come to rest.” It’s clear that Levine knew these wonderful poems would be among his last, and he seems to come to terms with his impending nonbeing: “These places where I had lived/ all the days of my life were giving up/ their hold on me and not a moment too soon.” (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"The surprise of Levine’s last book [of poems] is not just how much he continues to be preoccupied with Detroit and Spain, but how good-natured and playful some of these last poem are. . . . He saw the life around us clearly. That clarity . . . comes from his extraordinary empathy, whether for an old typewriter, the women who clean offices at night, or the mice looking for something to eat.”—Charles Simic, The New York Review of Books

“The great American poet Philip Levine walked from the streets of Detroit to the fields of Fresno trying to make sense of the seemingly senseless, celebrating the truly forgotten men and women of our society, in sharp contrast to the cheap slogans, dog whistles and empty rhetoric of the day. . . . Poet, polemicist, teacher, truth teller . . . his words are here to guide us. Will we listen?” —Paul Wilner, San Francisco Chronicle

"A long, subtle goodbye; the speaker recalls scenes from his working-class background in Michigan and the places and people that shaped his writing . . . Raises questions about culture, power, poverty and art, before turning back to more personal struggles." —Elizabeth Lund, The Washington Post

"This stunning final collection is one more reminder that Philip Levine is irreplaceable . . . The meditative music of Levine’s deeply thoughtful, elegiac poetry will echo in the literary memory of this country." —Laverne Firth, New York Journal of Books

"With rare generosity of spirit, Levine celebrated a working class that has largely disappeared. His poems are ghostly reminders of decades of what once was ordinary life . . . A plainspoken and eloquent final collection." —BBC

"In this potent, subtly liberated, consciously final collection, Levine looks back over his life with awe, wry bemusement, and elegiac imagination . . . The past was Levine’s wellspring, and he evokes its depths with boundless gratitude in the magnificent, transcendent, closing poem, “The Last Shift,” in which everything goes quiet, still, and dark." —Donna Seaman, Booklist

"In this posthumous collection of new poems, Levine extends the content of his American working-class poetics both to look back at his past and to push himself to reckon with the future . . . Wonderful." —Publishers Weekly

"Pleasingly thought-provoking . . . Levine continues to be a vivid chronicler of life inside the industrial, blue-collar, rustbelt America of his early years, in the mid-twentieth century." —Charlie Rossiter, Poetry Spoken Here

From the Publisher

★ 09/15/2016
Throughout his long, celebrated writing career, Pulitzer Prize winner Levine (1928–2015) rarely strayed from the subjects that most inspired—or haunted—him: the "corrugated world" of mid-20th-century Detroit, a childhood lived within a robust cast of family characters (such as Aunt Rebecca "who carried her little fists like hammers"), and the plain beauty of functional things. This final collection of poems to be selected by the poet himself works those same themes, though here it seems that age tempers nostalgia with the sad awareness of irrevocable change: "I still go back each year to Detroit/ to relive my long childhood in the houses/ that burned down ages ago." Even when Levine observes nature, echoes of the factory linger; a jay has "a voice like tin snips/ dragged across a steel file," and when other birds join in they produce "an oratorio of teamsters." Lost things find their places in Levine's poems, particularly America's vanished manufacturing economy and the working-class lives of European immigrants. These are not romanticized but preserved instead in a language "alive with the grubby/ texture all actual things possess/ after the wind and weather batter them." VERDICT Poetry lovers will want Levine's last word.—Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY

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