The Last Shift: Poems [Paperback]

Now in paperback--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. 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 Ml“2