The experiences, images, and emotions of that period of his life became inescapable, regardless of time and geographical distance they “kept going / on and on into the present,” so that even in a distant other country we find him describing an angry, thieving world: “I heard / an angry sea rising against the shore / below my balcony and the winds / raiding the pines and knew morning / would break on a different world.” He well knew how the world’s weather can alter us forever, especially the young who may have no other experiences to counter or resist the destructive forces that twist and subdue them. Many of these poems of the past are narrated in present tense precisely because the past was always vividly present for Levine. the same moon / that left Detroit before I finished high school.” the unseen stars / that years ago we stopped believing were there. Published posthumously, The Last Shift is and will be the last book of new poetry by Philip Levine, his “last shift” of turning the scrap metal of the inescapable wreckage of his youth-a youth robbed by the crushing exploitation of night-shift work in the Detroit auto industry-into the beautifully elegiac vehicles of his poems.Īs with his previous books, Levine here portrays workers (himself and many others) deprived of vitality, opportunity, and even hope by a harsh, uncaring capitalism and continued economic desperation forced by low pay: “It’s till Monday / 2,000 miles and fifty years / later and at my back I always / hear Chevy Gear & Axle / grinding the night-shift workers / into antiquity,” and also “In Detroit no one walks under the moon.
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