The Last Shift
Poems
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- € 4,49
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- € 4,49
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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."
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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."
