The Mercy: Poems - Hardcover

Levine, Philip

 
9780375401381: The Mercy: Poems
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375401385 ISBN 13: 9780375401381
Verlag: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

A collection of poems on journeys--from innocence to experience, from youth to age, and from life to death

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Philip Levine was born in 1928 in Detroit, where he was formally educated in the public schools and at Wayne University (now Wayne State University). After a succession of industrial jobs, he left the country before settling in Fresno, California, where he taught at the university there until his retirement. He has received many awards for his books of poems, most recently the National Book Award in 1991 for What Work Is, and the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for The Simple Truth.

Aus dem Klappentext

e's new collection of poems (his first since The Simple Truth was awarded the Pulitzer Prize) is a book of journeys: the necessary ones that each of us takes from innocence to experience, from youth to age, from confusion to clarity, from sanity to madness and back again, from life to death, and occasionally from defeat to triumph. The book's mood is best captured in the closing lines of the title poem, which takes its name from the ship that brought the poet's mother to America:

A nine-year-old girl travels
all night by train with one suitcase and an orange.
She learns that mercy is something you can eat
again and again while the juice spills over
your chin, you can wipe it away with the back
of your hands and you can never get enough.

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The Unknowable

Practicing his horn on the Williamsburg Bridge
hour after hour, "woodshedding" the musicians
called it, but his woodshed was the world.
The enormous tone he borrowed from Hawkins
that could fill a club to overflowing
blown into tatters by the sea winds
teaching him humility, which he carries
with him at all times, not as an amulet
against the powers of animals and men
that mean harm or the lure of the marketplace.
No, a quality of the gaze downward
on the streets of Brooklyn or Manhattan.
Hold his hand and you'll see it, hold his eyes
in yours and you'll hear the wind singing
through the cables of the bridge that was home,
singing through his breath--no rarer than yours,
though his became the music of the world
thirty years ago. Today I ask myself
how he knew the time had come to inhabit
the voice of the air and how later
he decided the time had come for silence,
for the world to speak any way it could?
He wouldn't answer because he'd find
the question pompous. He plays for money.
The years pass, and like the rest of us
he ages, his hair and beard whiten, the great
shoulders narrow. He is merely a man--
after all--a man who stared for years
into the breathy, unknowable voice
of silence and captured the music.

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Verlag
Alfred A. Knopf
Erscheinungsdatum
1999
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375401385
ISBN 13 
9780375401381
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
81
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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Softcover