For an American poet who has won the National Book Award (1980, 1991) as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1995), Philip Levine remains under-published and under-attended to in the UK, one more indication of the travails that British and American poems face on their trans-Atlantic journey. Levine’s Stranger to Nothing represents only his second book-length offering on the UK poetry scene. This volume samples poems spanning over four decades, from Levine's 1963 debut On the Edge to his latest collection, 2004’s Breath.

A poet who hails from the Upper Midwest region of the United States, Levine’s delivery is ‘democratic’ in the best sense of the term. From the very first poems of the book, we experience the power of his direct and plain-spoken style. In the opening poem, ‘For Fran’, written about Levine’s wife, the poet observes the way:

She packs the flower beds with leaves,
Rags, dampened papers, ties with twine
The lemon tree, but winter carves
Its features on the uprooted stem.

In this stanza, Levine as narrator locates his wife in the midst of the garden, wherein she takes part in the process of nurturing this microcosm of the organic world, the one from which we too often feel alienated. Here, as elsewhere, Levine refuses to Disney-fy or idealize nature. The natural world possesses a harsh beauty that Levine, a poet also adept at urban scenes, detects and elucidates for us. Through the remainder of the poem, the poet’s eyes remain fixed on his wife, ‘the true vein in her neck’, as he muses on the nature of their relationship. Without being heavy-handed in his analogy, Levine hints back to the story of the first mythological couple, in Eden, and Adam’s expulsion from the Garden to ‘where nothing but his wants remain’. This leads the poet, speaking particularly from his role as the ‘man’ of the family, to wonder in the final nine lines of the poem:

What do we do to those we need,

To those whose need of us endures
Even in the knowledge of what we are?
I turn to her whose future bears
The promise of appalling air,

My living wife, Frances Levine,
Mother of Theodore, John, and Mark,
Out of whatever we have been
We will make something for the dark.

Love remains here admixed with a sort of desparation, an innate needfulness. This love exists in the midst of life’s darkness, in ‘the promise of appalling air’, the ‘appalling’ here resonating with the funerary ‘pall’ and the ebbing of life. Whereas alternating lines throughout the poem have similar vowel or consonantal sounds that create an aural cohesion, the final stanza picks up strong end rhymes in an A-B-A-B fashion. This signals a certainty of the fruitfulness of this shared love in the face of ‘the dark’.

As exemplified in ‘For Fran’, Levine’s earlier poems reveal an attention to and experimentation with form. When attuned to form, Levine utilizes to great effect variations in patterns of stress and rhyme, as well as the interrelationship between stanzas. This attentiveness seems lacking in much of his later work, as these poems tend to contain longer lines and longer stanzas—de facto. This habit of formal monotony leads to an overdrawn sense of flatness that runs throughout many of these poems. You begin to feel as though each poem becomes an exercise in story telling, and the method of telling, long lines with seemingly random line breaks and few or no stanza breaks, makes it difficult for the reader to stay with the poet.

That said, I will now make a partial retraction, but only a partial one, as one of my favourite poems of the collection belongs to the later section of the book. In ‘The Great Truth’, we witness Levine at his best—telling a story that sits on the edge of a shadow, a phantasm of memory involving a man looking back on part of his adolescent past. The narrator reflects on the Sunday morning walks that he and ‘Uncle Nate’, ostensibly a neighbour and family friend, used to take on ‘the island’, ‘a public park/ in the Detroit River’. The narrator recalls the walks taking them ‘into the silent and darkened woods/ …echoing with crow calls’. We are told that Nate, ‘the September he came back from prison’, ‘took a murderous night job in the forge room at Cadillac’. We are never told explicitly what takes place in the woods beyond the walk, but the descriptive tones of many of the words used in the poem point us toward darker realities. The narrator tells us of Uncle Nate:

…Whatever he was looking for
he never said, and I was too young to ask.
Eleven then, a growing boy, I believed
there were answers. I believed one morning
he’d turn suddenly to tell me why men and boys
went into such forbidding places or pacing
beside him, I would see some transformation
up ahead where the sky, faceless and gray, hung
above the pin oaks….

The poem closes with the narrator returning to the woods with his brother, many years later. As he stands among ‘new spruce and pine’, he notices:

Up ahead what little I could see of sky
lightened as though urging me toward something
waiting for me more than half a century, some
great truth to live by now that it was too late
to live in the world other than I do.

This lament and reconciliation come as the narrator recognizes the concrete impact that these events had in shaping who he is, and according to his own view, of who he will continue to be.

In this poem, encompassing fifty years of time and various scenes, Levine demonstrates how longer lines without a stanza break can work well. The only break in this one stanza poem occurs within the line that tells us that Uncle Nate’s visits have ceased. Here, the formal structure reinforces the narrative and cues the reader to the significance of this moment. The formal unity of the poem allows these experiences, the imagery, interaction, and feel of each, to coexist and resonate with one another in a fractured unison.

This collection further solidifies Levine’s reputation as a first rate poet and storyteller whose style shuns any pretense of false decorum. The emotions and states of being that his poems explore expose a generous nature without slipping into pseudo-sentimentality. This collection gives the British poetry readership the opportunity to once again discover this fine poet from across the ocean.

Donovan McAbee is a PhD student in the School of English at the University of St Andrews. He writes poems on odd bits of paper and in a notebook, but he hasn't gotten around to submitting any of them for publication. He insists this has nothing to do with a fear of rejection. His ex-girlfriend disagrees.