Levine, Philip

Multicultural Law Enforcement: Strategies for Peacekeeping in a Diverse Society (3rd Edition)
Average customer rating: 3 out of 5 stars
  • Criminal Just Instructor and State Police Lieutenant
  • One star too many
  • someone not quoted in the book
  • Better than I expected
  • Multicultural Law Enforcement
Multicultural Law Enforcement: Strategies for Peacekeeping in a Diverse Society (3rd Edition)
Robert M. Shusta , Deena R. Levine , Herbert Z. Wong , and Philip R. Harris
Manufacturer: Prentice Hall
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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  1. Community Policing: Partnerships for Problem Solving (with InfoTrac)
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ASIN: 0131133071

Book Description

From a diverse team of writers whose expertise spans law enforcement and cross-cultural relations, comes a book with comprehensive coverage of sensitive topics and issues related to diversity and multiculturalism facing police today and in the 21st century. It contains insightful as well as practical information and guidelines on how law enforcement professionals can work effectively with diverse cultural groups, both inside their organizations as well as in the community. Focusing on the cross-cultural and racial contact that police officers and civilian employees have with citizens, victims, suspects, and co-workers from diverse backgrounds, this book contains information on racial profiling, hate crimes, community-based policing, undocumented immigrants and immigrant women, urban dynamics, and gays and lesbians in law enforcement. For law enforcement managers, supervisors, officers, and instructors.

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars Criminal Just Instructor and State Police Lieutenant.......2007-04-22

I will simply say this about this text. This information is a must read for all who entertain the thought of being a police officer, be it city, county, state or federal. This text is crucial as an "additional tool" for officers; educating one's self in multi-cultural diversity is a good thing especially when taking into account the incredibly diverse population in the U.S. (A dozen scenarios of unecessarily escalated contact with police officers come to mind...)

I am a Lieutenant with the Indiana State Police and an adjunct criminal justice professor at a local college. My students are all interested in becoming police officers. For the most part they come from small towns in mostly white areas. The benefits of specific awareness/respect of other cultures will only help them should they reach their goal to become officers. The better educated more culturally aware officers are truly the most effective ones. Great investigators know how to relate to all kinds of people. This textbook gives us some insight into the communication barriers and cultural hot buttons as well as general behavioral aspects of others. I consider this topic a fundamental building block for a well rounded police officer. Through awareness and understanding we can perform our jobs better and better serve all of our citizens. (our duty) I think some of the previous reviews of this book must be from officers who are too stubborn to change or too disinterested to study. Most officers mistakenly believe that their skills at marksmanship, hand-to-hand self-defense, pursuit driving skills, physical fitness etc., are the most important attributes of a good police officer. Statististically speaking, officer safety and effectiveness improve dramatically by reversing the order and placing "communication" first in line. This text helps to point out better ways for officers to communicate to the people they are sworn to protect and serve. This improved communication has a residual increased officer safety. "I'd rather talk them into jail than fight all the way there..." My thoughts.

1 out of 5 stars One star too many.......2007-02-20

This book is garbage. It contains nothing that will help a police officer do their job safer or more effectively. This book is just a feel-good publication.

1 out of 5 stars someone not quoted in the book.......2006-10-26

I thought this book was the most horrible thing I've ever read. The lies, half-truths and hypocrisies should have this book listed under fiction. How bad is this book. When you have to have someone, that is a source for the material in the book, come online and give it a positive review it can't be worth a damn. That's right. David E. Barlow (who hides in the halls of academia) is quoted throughout this book and found it necessary to come here and defend this book by giving it a 5 star review. Those who can, do; those who can't, teach. And the truth never needs defending.

3 out of 5 stars Better than I expected.......2006-05-08

This was among the 7 pieces of source material on my most recent exam. It was better than I expected. I looked at it from the perspective that I should use a person's culture to my advantage. With a familiarity of culture specific issues, I can make myself a more effective police officer. I found the author's writing to be of high quality, but book did not make me more culturally diverse. If you are looking for a book that teaches you how to be a police officer, this is not it. If you are looking for a book that might explain why the Iranian guy got mad at you last week, this is the right one.

1 out of 5 stars Multicultural Law Enforcement.......2006-03-21

The worse book I have ever read. This book is filled with Liberal jibberish and worthless information that the authors try to pass off as fact. This 500+ page masterpiece is loaded with unfactual opinions from people who know absolutely nothing about Police work. It could have been explained in 50 or less pages. Don't waist your money!!!!!
New Selected Poems
Average customer rating: 5 out of 5 stars
  • A collection from the most honest poet around
  • Levine A True Master
  • Fantastic American poetry collection
New Selected Poems
Philip Levine
Manufacturer: Knopf
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Similar Items:
  1. What Work Is
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  5. The Selected Levis (Pitt Poetry Series)

ASIN: 0679401652
Release Date: 1991-04-30

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars A collection from the most honest poet around.......2005-04-26

Philip Levine is an amazing poet and this really is an amazing collection. I recently saw him do a reading and was so floored by the brutal honesty and anger of his poems. I am an 8th English teacher and have given my honors classes some of his poems, which they loved. Philip Levine works on so many levels and can be enjoyed by anyone. Must reads from this collection include: "You Can Have It," "They Feed They Lion," and "Animals are Passing from Our Lives."

5 out of 5 stars Levine A True Master.......2000-06-10

In my opinion, Philip Levine is perhaps the most honest poet writing in America today. As a master's candidate in an English department, I've endured much of the postmodern fluff that dominates modern poetry. In Levine's work, you won't find the typical introspective ramblings of the self-obsessed modern poet. Levine writes clearly and distinctly, with images that carry ideas. Levine doesn't resort to petty academic parlor tricks to describe the disappearence of self--check out "Silent in America" for a portrait of a man with a voice so powerful that he cannot even use it.

In *New and Selected Poems*, readers will find a real master craftsman at work. Along with artfully buried rhymes and off rhymes, Levine also experiments quite successfully with both meter and syllabic verse. The amazine thing, however, is that unless you really pay attention to the work, you miss these things. Levine hypnotizes with his ideas and phrasing and clear, sharp images.

Here are the voices of the lost; here are the voices of the damned. Levine rejects the postmodern destruction of self and has become a voice of the American poor in the Whitman tradition. As an epigraph in *New and Selected Poems* reads, "Vivas for those who have failed."

Levine has had a great influence on me and my work. Anyone writing poetry should check out Levine's work. I'd recommend _What Work Is_ also. In my opinion, it's his best book.

5 out of 5 stars Fantastic American poetry collection.......1998-01-04

Philip Levine¹s Collected Works is an amazing biography of a life. Spanning a so-far-incomplete life, we can follow Levine¹s progress of maturation. While the beginning poems are strong, it is the middle and end pieces that were the most startling, poems about the working class and later his son. His ability to mix narration and the more typical elements of poetry is extraordinary. Compare the first and last sentences of ³One For The Rose²: ³Three weeks ago I went back / to the same street corner where / 27 years before I took a bus for Akron, / Ohio, but now there was only a blank space / with a few concrete building blocks / scattered among the beer cans², ³Instead I was born / in the wrong year and in the wrong place, / and I made my way so slowly and badly / that I remember every single turn, / and each one smells like an overblown rose, / yellow, American, beautiful, and true.² Levine writes American poetry in the American diction better than anyone since Whitman or Sandburg. His language is conservative and seems simple at first, but when the poem blossoms we are all the more surprised and excited because of it. This book is a gem to read and contains a story, making it as hard to put down as your favorite novel.
What Work Is
Average customer rating: 5 out of 5 stars
  • American Toughness
  • Levine's life work at last just is
What Work Is
Philip Levine
Manufacturer: Knopf
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0679740589
Release Date: 1992-04-21

Amazon.com

If there is such a thing as a working man's poet, then Philip Levine is it. Born into a blue-collar family in Detroit, Levine grew up amidst the steel mills and auto factories of Motor City. Laboring in the plants radicalized both Levine's politics and his art; in early works such as On the Edge and Not This Pig, he explored the gritty despair of urban working-class life, a reality that has continued to run through his later poetry as well. In his 1991 National Book Award-winning What Work Is, Levine revisits the scenes of his youth--only now the factories are shut down, the towns that depended on them devastated. In the title poem, Levine conveys a multitude of meaning in the single image of men standing in line waiting for work: <blockquote> the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, "No,
we're not hiring today," for any
reason he wants. </blockquote> Factory workers aren't the only subjects here, however; in "Among Children" (an American response to Yeats's "Among School Children") Levine contemplates "the children of Flint, their fathers / work at the spark plug factory or truck / bottled water in 5 gallon sea-blue jugs / to the widows of the suburbs." For these children, he contends, the Book of Job would be the most appropriate reading.

What work is, Levine tells us, is the accretion of a lifetime of experiences, compromises, and disappointments. It is drinking gin for the first time at 14, a premature leap into manhood; it is that first job with its double-edged promise of a "new life of working and earning," and later the unrealized dreams of escaping that life. Levine's poems move back and forth in time, touch on issues of race, religion, education--even gardening--and leave the reader with a moving portrait of working-class life from the 1940s to the present day. --Alix Wilber

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars American Toughness.......2001-07-02

It is sad that we in the United States do not appreciate the strength and the variety of the poetry that our country has produced. A major instance of a contemporary poet whose writing deserves attention from a wider readership is Philip Levine. His book, "What Work Is" won the National Book Award for poetry in 1991. He has produced an impressive quantity of poetry which, in its very restraint and poignancy, can help bring meaning to people.

This is a short collection, consisting of four untitled sections. Section III consists of a single extended poem, "Burning" which is broadly autobiographical in character. The remaining three sections consist of a number of short poems with essentially two themes: the lives of the working poor prior to WWII and Levine's experiences as a boy growing up in Detroit. The poems with these themes overlap and are interspersed throughout the book with the earlier sections emphasizing vignettes of individuals doing the ordinary, desultory jobs that are the lot of most of us (such as "Coming Close", "Fire", "Every Blessed Day" and "What Work Is") while the latter section emphasizes Levine's Detroit experiences, the toughness of being a kid, his relationship with his brother, his love of boxing, and his exposure to Anti-Semitism. ("Coming of Age in Michigan", "The Right Cross", "The Sweetness of Bobby Hefka" "On the River".)

The poems are lucidly written with understatement and a lack of sentimentality which underscores the emotions and the passions they contain. It might be useful to compare these poems to the work of three other writers.

First, the poems reminded me of Walt Whitman, in their compassion for an attempt to understand the American worker. They lack Whitman's bravura and optimism, however, and content themselves with painting harshness and with emphasizing the tenacity people need to get by.

A writer with somewhat similar themes to Levine is the under-appreciated Victorian novelist, George Gissing in his books of lower class life in Victorian London such as The Nether World. Levine has a similar sort of attraction to the life of the poor, the unsuccessful and the down and out. He has at once a sympathy for his characters and a distance from them that Gissing seems to lack, for all his portrayals and descriptions.

A third writer is the late poet-nnovelist Charles Bukowski, a favorite of "underground" readers. Bukowski writes of ne'r do wells, prostitutes, and drunkards, -- as well as doing a lot of writing about himself. Levine has some of the same attraction to the scorned of society, but his people are the working poor, and their stories are told with restraint and dignity, unlike those of Bukowski, and also unlike the work of Bukowski, with literary skill and grace.

This is a book of poetry that has both the sadness and the grittiness of life and the toughness to understand and surmount it.

5 out of 5 stars Levine's life work at last just is.......1997-10-01

A devotion of Levine's life's work, the world of work, at last becomes one of his book's true focus and shows Levine, one of our greatest living poets, at his best. The controlled lyricism of his narratives hone in with precision, as when he pulls in on a woman's forearm at work, a minute detail in a vast world of labor to show us the universality of a struggle Levine himself has endured. While not every poem lives in the factories and workplaces, the fundamental aspect of work in our lives manifests itself in each piece. The short lines and continual enjambment gives his stanzas both the feel and appearence of quality reportage and yet are infused with an empathy and passion for his subjects that both moves and educates. This is the democratization of poetry that Wordsworth aspired to and Whitman acheived. Levine carries on in that tradtion and concretizes, with this book, his place among those American poets to be read in the next century.
The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography (Poets on Poetry)
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    The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography (Poets on Poetry)
    Philip Levine
    Manufacturer: University of Michigan Press
    ProductGroup: Book
    Binding: Paperback

    AuthorsAuthors | Arts & Literature | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books
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    ASIN: 0472086251

    Book Description

    The Bread of Time is an amalgam of celebration and quest. In this memoir, Philip Levine celebrates the poets who were his teachers--particularly John Berryman and Yvor Winters, writers whose lives and work, he believes, have been misunderstood and misinterpreted. In the process of writing this account of his childhood and young manhood in Detroit and of his middle and later years in California and Spain, Levine came to realize that he was also engaged in a quest, striving to discover "how I am." The resulting work provides a double-edged revelation of the way writers grow. Witty and elegantly rendered in a prose that is as characteristically Levine's as his verse, this is superb--and essential--reading for anyone interested in contemporary poetry and poets.
    Philip Levine has received many awards for his books of poems, most recently the National Book Award for What Work Is in 1991 and the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for The Simple Truth in 1995. Levine recently retired from the University of California, Fresno.
    Ocean Avenue (The New Issues Press Poetry Series)
    Average customer rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
    • In admiration of Morling's accomplishment
    • Beautiful and simple
    • Beautiful, fresh and perceptive.
    Ocean Avenue (The New Issues Press Poetry Series)
    Malena Morling
    Manufacturer: New Issues Poetry Press
    ProductGroup: Book
    Binding: Paperback

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    ASIN: 0932826687

    Customer Reviews:

    5 out of 5 stars In admiration of Morling's accomplishment.......2002-05-11

    In OCEAN AVENUE, Malena Mörling captivates us with an eyeful of American urbanity-crowds, traffic, pigeons. But the cumulative effect is not "the color of pavement" (20). Mörling's muscle as an observer lies in her selection of detail, as well as her imaginative empathy. She's drawn to the human experience; one may be reminded of Whitman's Civil War poems. Mörling is well aware of life's harsh realities-violence, poverty, loneliness, private suffering-as seen in poems "Among Pillars of Dust" and "For Bartleby." And because Mörling is conscious of her own mortality ("First Thought," "Visiting," "Three Daffodils," "Let Me Say This"), she expresses a greater sense of immediacy by rightly speaking in the present tense. No wonder she chants her own version of carpe deum: "Walk more slowly now" (20). But what I admire most is the way Mörling treads "between two contraries," as Robert Hass might say, by letting the world speak through her, while also claiming certain universals-which simply means: "...we still ask the questions: / `Where do we come from? / Who are we? / Where are we going?'" (59).

    5 out of 5 stars Beautiful and simple.......2001-06-12

    Morling's poems are are fresh and deceptively simple, and alive. There are definite overtones of Eastern philosophy and religion here, as in the superb "Standing on the Earth Among the Cows." Ocean Avenue is full of careful observation, celebration of the everyday. A great new voice and a generous new heart in American poetry.

    4 out of 5 stars Beautiful, fresh and perceptive........1999-08-21

    A beautiful book dealing lightly with dark subjects, filled with fresh modifiers, weighty conclusions, and perceptions as intense as a child's. Morling holds onto things that have passed through most of us, weighs them, and puts them on shelves so we can look at them again. Great stuff!
    Discourse and Technology: Multimodal Discourse Analysis (Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics (Proceedings))
    Average customer rating: Not rated
      Discourse and Technology: Multimodal Discourse Analysis (Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics (Proceedings))

      Manufacturer: Georgetown University Press
      ProductGroup: Book
      Binding: Paperback

      PostmodernismPostmodernism | Movements & Periods | History & Criticism | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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      ASIN: 1589011015
      Matthew Brady and His World
      Average customer rating: Not rated
        Matthew Brady and His World
        Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt and Philip Levine Kunhardt Jr.
        Manufacturer: Time-Life Books
        ProductGroup: Book
        Binding: Hardcover

        GeneralGeneral | Photography | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
        ASIN: B000MBZGW4

        Product Description

        Collectible hardcover; brown boards, gilt lettering, color photo endpapers, gilt text block. 1977 first edition. 301 pages plus index. Lovely black and white photographs by Matthew Brady, Civil War photographer. Produced by Time-Life Books from pictures in the Meserve Collection.
        The Simple Truth: Poems
        Average customer rating: 5 out of 5 stars
        • Mr. Levine's Simple Truth
        • He writes plain, about things plain, and is plain fabulous!
        • Beautiful book
        • The title says it all
        The Simple Truth: Poems
        Philip Levine
        Manufacturer: Knopf
        ProductGroup: Book
        Binding: Paperback

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        ASIN: 0679765840
        Release Date: 1996-09-03

        Amazon.com

        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.

        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."

        Customer Reviews:

        5 out of 5 stars Mr. Levine's Simple Truth.......2001-08-02

        Philip Levine writes in the title poem of this collection:

        "Some things/you know all your life. They are so simple and true/they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,/they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,/the glass of water, the absence of light gathering/ in the shadows of picture frames, they must be/ naked and alone, they must stand for themselves."

        These lines capture many of the themes of this Pulitzer-prize winning book. The poems in this collection are deceptively simple, "naked and alone". They generally involve an incident or person, recollected by the poet from his past. The incident is recounted in bare unrhymed lines, without hyperbole or judgment. We are encouraged to see the incident, as we see the still life reproduced on the cover of the volume and to let it "stand for itself". The poems are elegaic in tone and the effect of the memory is generally one of deep sadness.

        Many of the poems have a deliberately pictorial quality, as reflected in their titles, that remind one of a photo or of a painting in a museum. In many cases, the reader is tempted to conceive in the mind's eye a painting to accompany the poem. This is true, particularly, as the book progresses into its final section with its descriptions of the poet's mother ("My Mother with Purse, the Summer they Murdered the Spanish Poet"), father ("My Father with Cigarette Twelve Years before the Nazis could Break his Heart"), and others ("Edward Lieberman, Entrepreneur, four years after the Burnings on Okinawa") One of the poems of the collection is title simply "Photography". Ironically, this poem is less pictorial than many others. It relates a sad incident from the poet's childhood involving his Aunt, and others, and focuses on the ravages of time and memory.

        The poems also focus on the role imagination plays in constituting our reality. The first poem of the collection "On the Meeting of Garcia Lorca and Hart Crane" relates a meeting between these two romantic 20th Century poets and alludes to Crane's apparent suicide in jumping from a ship bound from Vera Cruz to New York. Crane's tragic but romantic death is juxtaposed with the vision coming "to an ordinary man staring/ at a filthy river" as he contemplates not only Crane and Lorca but his son falling to his death "from/the roof of a building he works on." With a voice of irony, the poet asks us to "bless the imagination. It gives/ us the myths we live by. Let's bless/ the visionary power of the human-- the only animal that's got it--"

        These poems have a multi-layered simplicity realized through an understated voice of sadness and illuminated by imagination.

        5 out of 5 stars He writes plain, about things plain, and is plain fabulous!.......1999-10-03

        Philip Levine once vowed to be the voice of the poor, the simple, those without voice--a vow he has not broken in his sixty-plus years of writing poetry. In 1995, Levine was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his collection of poems, "the Simple Truth". That prize would mean less to him than the knowledge that thousands of people have found enjoyment and comfort from reading his poems--that from his work, they came to better understand our common vulnerabilty to the state of being human. Levine's poems are an echo of the emotions trapped in the reader's heart; they are a friendly voice giving substance to what has been lived, but not spoken. Levine's title poem "The Simple Truth" invites the reader to recognize and celebrate the stark beauty of simple things. Each poem in this collection builds on the other to introduce the reader to the poet, who in turn introduces readers to perfect poetic expression, so personal that they will stop and say "Yes!! That IS how it is!" Anyone who cannot relate to or reconginze themself in at least half of the poems in this fine book, have not read it. That's "the simple truth."

        5 out of 5 stars Beautiful book.......1999-05-21

        Levine's poetry often moves me. In my opinion, this is his best book. His poems strike me as being very honest; they make me accept the complicated mess of joys and disappointments that it means to be human. The title poem, "The Simple Truth," explains exactly what I mean (and in a better way than I'm doing here). Please read this book.

        5 out of 5 stars The title says it all.......1997-03-02

        Poetry, to many, brings to mind names like Shakespeare, Eliot, Milton, Yeats--figures of artistic genius who crafted intricate texts laden with complex (sometimes private) imagery and embodied in a nearly-inaccessible form. To them, the interpretation of poetry is best left to career academics who spend lifetimes working out such complex systems of words and images. Philip Levine to the rescue! That is, for those resigned to avoid poetry he rescues the immense pleasure it is capable of giving regardless of literary background. His prosaic verse-columns give themselves up to the reader with no fight, laying bare and accessible the truth Levine hopes to convey. Setting is given usually within the first line, as Levine constructs an everyday scene animated with very human characters who live life day by day--trying to make it from this one to the next. From this the poem (often a narrative) builds piece by piece using bits of conversation, natural observations, personal thoughts, and other snippets of life through whatever drama is present to end as simply as it started--sometimes in a whisper, sometimes with a raised voice, but always with simplicity. Without complex formal elements, Levine's poems are forced to rely on their simplicity, their commonality for what is not an ornate beauty but a simple one. Such verse shows its Americanness with every word, with every image as it articulates simply the truth it lays open--there for the taking. In The Simple Truth is an artist at the zenith of his poetic genius--an artist who is, at the same time, true to his self and to his roots as an American. This is what poetry should be and is meant to be.
        Breath: Poems
        Average customer rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
        • Breath and the West Wind
        • Auto Pilot
        • Find Your Soul
        Breath: Poems
        Philip Levine
        Manufacturer: Knopf
        ProductGroup: Book
        Binding: Paperback

        20th Century20th Century | Poetry | United States | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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        ASIN: 0375710787
        Release Date: 2006-01-17

        Book Description

        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.

        Customer Reviews:

        5 out of 5 stars Breath and the West Wind.......2006-11-21

        This is a wonderful book for readers of Levine who will find him here grappling with twilight themes and the legacy of romantic poetry. "Call It Music" and "Our Reds" are Levine at his best, and a good entry point also for those new to his work. Nevertheless, if you have not read Levine, start with "What Work Is."

        3 out of 5 stars Auto Pilot.......2006-09-07

        I have admired Mr. Levine's work for years, have been to numerous readings. Perhaps only Wright and Dickey match his ability to turn the lyrical moment from the straight-ahead narrative. But I must be honest and write that he has, especially since "The Simple Truth," been turning the same styllistic moves and strategies over and over, to the point that his poetry has become a character sketch of the poet rather than the poet's illumination of his world. How many poems, for instance, must begin or be moved by adverb phrases? How many poems about the same subject matter? (Sharon Olds fell victim to the repetative theme about 10 years ago)

        5 out of 5 stars Find Your Soul.......2005-04-03

        Philip Levine does not have the recognition he deserves as the foremost poet in America writing in English. True, he has plenty of fine critics who praise him as they should, but his work somehow should be on everyone's lips more than it is. Breath has him still doing it like no one else. He elevates and makes elegiac the life of the working person - the life of maybe not everyone, but you and I.

        I need to tell you about my relationship with Levine's poems. When I first read Levine's "Burned" (later to appear in What Work Is), it gave me a nightmare about my father that both terrified me and made me love my Father like I never had before. In fact, I made it back to Baltimore in time to plant a kiss on his dieing forehead, and I often think about that poem when I think about that moment.
        It is true that I arranged Bukowski's second public reading ever and had it video-taped (as reported in the Chicago newspaper review of the video recording, Bukowski at Bellevue). Appearing in Hank's short story made his work play a part in my life, but nothing like Levine's work. His new book has poems that have the same kinds of power. They are about naming when naming is, in the words of the poems, "not enough". Philip Levine's words will always be with us. You do not have to go as far as I do and snap up a new book by him without even looking inside. However, you owe it to you or your soul to read Breath.

        Carl Waluconis
        So Ask: Essays, Conversations, and Interviews (Poets on Poetry)
        Average customer rating: Not rated
          So Ask: Essays, Conversations, and Interviews (Poets on Poetry)
          Philip Levine
          Manufacturer: University of Michigan Press
          ProductGroup: Book
          Binding: Paperback

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          ASIN: 0472064207

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          An engaging and intimate collection by an American original

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