What Work Is : Poems

Judge Philip Levine
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
 9780679740582
0-679-74058-9

Winner of the National Book Award in 1991 This collection amounts to a hymn of praise for all the workers of America. These proletarian heroes, with names like Lonnie, Loo, Sweet Pea, and Packy, work the.

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furnaces, forges, slag heaps, assembly lines, and loading docks at places with unglamorous names like Brass Craft or Feinberg and Breslins First-Rate Plumbing and Plating. Only Studs Terkels Working approaches the pathos and beauty of this book. But Levines characters are also significant for their inner lives, not merely their jobs. They are unusually artistic, living at the borders of dreams. One reads The Tempest slowly to himself; another ponders a diagonal chalk line drawn by his teacher to suggest a triangle, the roof of a barn, or the mysterious separation of the dark from the dark. What Work Is ranks as a major work by a major poet . . . very accessible and utterly American in tone and language. Daniel L. Guillory, Library Journal