The Simple Truth
by Philip Levine
Summary
Thirty three poems that move between elegy and prayer, written by a poet who spent his early adulthood in Detroit factories and never stopped writing about the people he worked beside.
Levine is interested in what an ordinary life contains and how little of it gets recorded. The poems gather family, work, memory, invention and public history, and they keep circling the question of what can honestly be said about a person once they are gone. The title poem is about a plate of boiled potatoes and it is not a metaphor, or not only one. Levine's method is to stay with the plain thing until it opens.
He is among the most approachable of major American poets, which sometimes counts against him with readers who expect difficulty. The lines are conversational, the vocabulary is ordinary, and the poems appear to be simply telling you something. The craft is in the timing and in how long he is willing to hold a moment before releasing it. Read them slowly and out loud if you can, because the rhythms are built for the speaking voice.
This is a good place to begin with Levine even though it came late in his career, and it is short enough to read in an evening and long enough to reward returning to. If it works for you, What Work Is is the companion volume, and the two together give you most of what he did: elegies for a class of people American poetry had largely left to novelists, written by someone who had done the work himself and never pretended otherwise.
Historical Context & Significance
The Simple Truth won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, published by Knopf. Levine had taken the National Book Award four years earlier for What Work Is, so the Pulitzer confirmed a reputation rather than making one.
Harold Bloom, who was not given to generosity, had already placed Levine's Selected Poems on the list of essential twentieth century books in The Western Canon, and the elegies here extend the plain, controlled pathos that earned that standing.
Levine was born in Detroit in 1928, educated in its public schools and at Wayne University, and worked a succession of industrial jobs before leaving the city for good and eventually settling in Fresno. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States and died in 2015 at eighty seven, by which time the factory poems he had been writing since the 1950s had outlasted most of the factories.