Philip Levine's 15th collection of poetry muses on the past--everything from friends lost, decisions made and potatoes eaten is remembered and considered. With humor and strikingly modest wisdom, Levine mingles realism and romanticism, producing fascinating, emotionally persuasive shifts and tonal modulations that epitomize a lived truth. As he laments his losses, he is also stoic, bending to acknowledge the misfortunes of others in total sympathy. The Simple Truth was the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1995.


From Library Journal
Levine's third book of new verse in six years offers further proof that since turning 60 his drive to explain his relationship to the world has never been stronger. For him, experience and knowledge are not given but are almost consciously wrested from life ("I'm an American,/even before I was fourteen I knew I would have/to create myself"). Though the usual touchstones of his work-adolescence in the 1940s, the death of Garcia Lorca, Detroit's industrial landscape-are ever present, this collection is more consistently narrative and elegiac than previous ones, elevating the minutiae of personal remembrance to an almost mythic significance, which in turn gives way to the larger permanence and mystery of existence as represented by night sky vistas and the forces of history. Levine (New Selected Poems, LJ 6/15/91) has been so much imitated that his diction and style are now the standard for much current mainstream poetry; thus, his work sometimes seems all too familiar, but few readers will fail to be moved by its earnest effort to reconcile life as lived both outside and inside the mind. Recommended for poetry collections.Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, N.Y.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review
. . . even in elegiac reflection . . . resists sadness, striving beyond. . .


Book Description
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."


From the Inside Flap
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."

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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."

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal