The Last Shift

October 17, 2016
In this posthumous collection of new poems, Levine (News of the World) extends the content of his American working-class poetics both to look back at his past and to push himself to reckon with the future. Hirsch, who organized and titled the book, writes in his foreword that Levine (1928–2015) “was a poet of the night shift, a late, ironic Whitman of our industrial heartland, and his life’s work is a long assault on isolation, an ongoing struggle against the enclosures of suffering.” Hardships, joys, and stories of old friends and the assembly floor make up the bulk of this book: “8 a.m. and we punch out/ and leave the place to our betters,/ the day shift jokers who think/ they’re in for fun,” but throughout, Levine takes moments to recenter before projecting forward: “The wind kept prodding/ at my back as though determined/ to push me away from where I was/ fearful, perhaps, I would come to rest.” It’s clear that Levine knew these wonderful poems would be among his last, and he seems to come to terms with his impending nonbeing: “These places where I had lived/ all the days of my life were giving up/ their hold on me and not a moment too soon.”

Starred review from September 15, 2016

Throughout his long, celebrated writing career, Pulitzer Prize winner Levine (1928-2015) rarely strayed from the subjects that most inspired--or haunted--him: the "corrugated world" of mid-20th-century Detroit, a childhood lived within a robust cast of family characters (such as Aunt Rebecca "who carried her little fists like hammers"), and the plain beauty of functional things. This final collection of poems to be selected by the poet himself works those same themes, though here it seems that age tempers nostalgia with the sad awareness of irrevocable change: "I still go back each year to Detroit/ to relive my long childhood in the houses/ that burned down ages ago." Even when Levine observes nature, echoes of the factory linger; a jay has "a voice like tin snips/ dragged across a steel file," and when other birds join in they produce "an oratorio of teamsters." Lost things find their places in Levine's poems, particularly America's vanished manufacturing economy and the working-class lives of European immigrants. These are not romanticized but preserved instead in a language "alive with the grubby/ texture all actual things possess/ after the wind and weather batter them." VERDICT Poetry lovers will want Levine's last word.--Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2016
In his foreword, editor Hirsch writes that Levine (19282015) was a poet of the night shift, a late, ironic Whitman of our industrial heartland, and that his poetry expressed anger, grief, and, finally, joy, a progression concentrated in this potent, subtly liberated, consciously final collection. Levine looks back over his life with awe, wry bemusement, and elegiac imagination. The factories of old Detroit clang on in his poet's psyche. He envisions an assembly line carrying human body parts, holy parts, and after he arrives in what should have been a paradise, a scrub jay has a voice like tin snips dragged / across a steel file. Levine writes poems of revelatory encounters in Spain and Italy, offers a dozen dawn songs, and ends a poem about a school trip to a foundry with a line that encapsulates his work: the day kept going / on and on into the present. The past was Levine's wellspring, and he evokes its depths with boundless gratitude in the magnificent, transcendent, closing poem, The Last Shift, in which everything goes quiet, still, and dark.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)