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The Last Shift
  • Published: 15 April 2018
  • ISBN: 9780451493774
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 96
  • RRP: $38.00
Categories:

The Last Shift

Poems

Formats & editions
EBook
8 Nov 2016
Paperback
15 Apr 2018
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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."
  • Published: 15 April 2018
  • ISBN: 9780451493774
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 96
  • RRP: $38.00
Categories:

About the author

Philip Levine

PHILIP LEVINE was born in 1928 in Detroit and attended Wayne State University. After a succession of industrial jobs, he left the city for good and lived in various parts of the country before settling in Fresno, California, where he taught at the state university until his retirement. He was the author of nineteen previous collections of poetry and was the recipient of two National Book Awards and the Pulitzer Prize, among many other honors. He was poet laureate from 2011 until 2012, and served twelve autumns as poet-in-residence at New York University. He died in February 2015.
portrait photo of Philip Levine

Also by Philip Levine

My Lost Poets
A Walk with Tom Jefferson
News of the World
Breath
The Mercy
The Simple Truth
What Work Is
See all

Praise for The Last Shift

  • "This stunning final collection is one more reminder that Philip Levine is irreplaceable . . . The meditative music of Levine's deeply thoughtful, elegiac poetry will echo in the literary memory of this country." --Laverne Firth, New York Journal of Books
  • "With rare generosity of spirit, Levine celebrated a working class that has largely disappeared. His poems are ghostly reminders of decades of what once was ordinary life . . . A plainspoken and eloquent final collection." --BBC