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Breath: Poems By Philip Levine.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Levine, Philip
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- American poetry--20th century.
- American poetry.
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource
- Edition:
- 1st ed.
- Place of Publication:
- New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.
- Summary:
- Always a poet of memory and invention, Philip Levine looks back at his own life as well as the adventures of his ancestors, his relatives, and his friends, and at their rites of passage into an America of victories and betrayals. He transports us back to the street where he was born "early in the final industrial century" to help us envision an America he's known from the 1930s to the present. His subjects include his brothers, a great-uncle who gave up on America and returned to czarist Russia, a father who survived unspeakable losses, the artists and musicians who inspired him, and fellow workers at the factory who shared the best and worst of his coming of age. Throughout the collection Levine rejoices in song-Dinah Washington wailing from a jukebox in midtown Manhattan; Della Daubien hymning on the crosstown streetcar; Max Roach and Clifford Brown at a forgotten Detroit jazz palace; the prayers offered to God by an immigrant uncle dreaming of the Judean hills; the hoarse notes of a factory worker who, completing another late shift, serenades the sleeping streets. Like all of Levine's poems, these are a testament to the durability of love, the strength of the human spirit, the persistence of life in the presence of the coming dark.
- Contents:
- Intro
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- I
- Gospel
- Praise
- Storms
- The Great Truth
- On 52nd Street
- Moradian
- The West Wind
- Keats in California
- Today and Two Thousand Years from Now
- The Two
- II
- My Brother, Antonio, the Baker
- Our Reds
- A View of Home
- The Lesson
- Dutch Treat
- The Esquire
- Home for the Holidays
- Breakfasts with Joachim
- For a Duro
- Houses in Order
- Dust
- III
- Naming
- IV
- 1/1/2000
- Yenkl
- My Father in the Wind
- The Invention of the Fado
- When the Shift Was Over
- On a Photograph of Simon Karaday
- My Given Name
- The Genius
- Call It Music
- Notes
- About the Author
- Other Books by This Author.
- Notes:
- Preliminaries omitted.
- ISBN:
- 0-307-51490-0
- 1-299-10914-4
- OCLC:
- 842874544
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