Closer to Paradise

Octogenerian Phillip Levine, who was born in Detroit of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents and worked in the mind-wrenching, body-breaking auto plants before he took up his poetic calling, has won two National Book Awards and a Pulitzer Prize. His seventeenth and newest collection of poetry, News of The World (Knopf), with a captivating cover design by Jason Booher, includes:

News of the World

Here’s something to know about Levine, from Bread of Time:

I was in that magical state in which nothing could hurt me or sidetrack me; I had achieved that extraordinary level of concentration we call inspiration. When I closed my eyes and looked back into the past, I did not see the blazing color of the forges of nightmare or the torn faces of the workers. I didn’t hear the deafening ring of metal on metal, or catch under everything the sweet stink of decay. Not on that morning. Instead I was myself in the company of men and women of enormous sensitivity, delicacy, consideration. I saw us touching each other emotionally and physically, hands upon shoulders, across backs, faces pressed to faces. We spoke to each other out of the deepest centers of our need, and we listened. In those terrible places designed to rob us of our bodies and our spirits, we sustained each other.