Leah Miranda Hughes
News of the World
Philip Levine
Publisher: Alfred A Knopf (Feb. 15, 2011)
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-71190-9
Reviewed by Leah Miranda Hughes
With Philip Levines appointment to the office of US Poet Laureate, Knopf reprinted the 2009 collection News of the World. Levine offers global news and universal truths, involving families and individuals, ranging from remote locations to international cities. Divided into quarters of eight poems apiece, very personal and inclusive poems resound in each section. The first section through pronoun usage alone presents a personal tone I and you, we and our, my guide readers across the U.S. beginning on the California coast. In this section, Levine begins to form an assertion that places and landscapes contain the life lived there long past the literal moment: there has to be more than dust (A Story, 6). The last poem of the section confirms the theme in a family story, saying,
My brother, blind now, tells me he is glad
to be alive, he calls every painful day
a gift hes not sure he earned but accepts
with joy. (15)
The second section begins in the poets hometown, Dearborn, where Henry Ford, dissatisfied with his life, has replaced fields and neighborhoods with modern industry. Again, personal perspective dominates the section, as the poet recounts family stories and memories of Detroit. Levine contrasts machinists to librarians, and brother to brother. He presents personal longings and narratives alongside names: Mama, Lorraine, Paducah, and GodAlmighty. Levine adds to his cast of characters Whitman, Melville, and Balzac, to name a few, perhaps in an effort to evoke a canonical muse. While intimate and seeking safe harbor, the poems have a dark undertone. They hint at trouble coming; they know trouble exists; yet, they articulate dreadful prophecies subversively: He wont ask / if the cry he heard was mine (27). The moments of despair, hidden admissions of love, and consequences of war are met by the poet with a general lack of language. The speaker presents scenes and moments to which he does not know exactly what to say: what should I tell her? (24). Definitely, his characters feel pain and dismay and they give voice to the experience, an uncertain voice asking, What were you thinking? (25) Where are we? (23). It is as if each poem insinuates lines from Of Love and Other Disasters:
Better
get out of here before its too late, (31)
Suitably, in the third section, the reader finds the speaker abroad, listening to a Dutch Doctor treat a patient. These eight prose poems draw from foreign lands including the island of Manhattan. Lisbon, Portugal; Barcelona and Ronda, Spain; Cuba; in a city where Armenians run the Greek restaurant and another where, for the right price, a Cadillac can be acquired in a few hours and a movie star in a day. From various corners comes news of politics, tourism, trade, language, and more canonical writers. Perhaps the poet even offers a slight nod to himself, when the Guardia Civil lieutenant instructs the speaker, they do not give Pulitzers to liars (40). Ending with the books title poem, the section provides a brief but global education from the differing landscapes, along with the advice: you must not read, you must look (41). This third quarter of Levines collection rings a more hopeful, positive note than the second. In diction and humor, the poet seems to predict a bright, liberated future for the individual. With deliberate line breaks forming interesting enjambments, these prosaic pieces juxtapose a person and a larger setting. One person experiences diversity, broadness, and collaborative cultures, shown in the poem aptly named Island, the universal truth of humanitys simultaneous isolation and collision. Sounding so Whitmanesque, Levine points out the merge of person and place, their intrigue connection:
One lives inside an immense,
endless opera with the singing
you realize this music is merely the background to a great
American epic. (38)
Perhaps the echoes back to Donne and Whitman encourage the lighter narrative of the section. Perhaps the long lines and curious stories lift toward a brighter horizon. Perhaps the spirit of liberty and potential of the speaker, journeying across the world, serves through tone as inspiration to the reader.
In contrast to Levines prose poems, the last section starts off with tighter form and meter. The deep reference and compact content of this group of poems can be epitomized by the title of the first poem, Alba. It is, of course, a poetic form: a love song, a provincial troubadour poem, a song lamenting the coming of day and the parting of lovers. It is also, of course, a place: a hill overlooking Barcelonas harbor, the reference point used in 1792 by Delambre and Mechain to measure the meridian mark distance to Dunkirk, which allowed them to calculate the distance between the North Pole and the Equator. The word, from Latin, means white, which explains usage in medical terminology for the white matter of the brain and spinal cord. As a species of plant, Alba is a weed called false daisy with a white flower; the black extract from the plant is used to make tattoos. So much content for four letters! as with many simple words in this three-page blank-verse iambic pentameter poem. Those words unify the poem land, last, warm wind, left, pure luck, and same, to name a few often in both sound and pace. In these small words, the speaker listens for an elusive message, a theme wound through all eight poems in the section. Can we hear The Music of Time? Can we hear what people tell us to our faces? Can we hear the voice or remorse, or the one calling our name, or the rain? Or the voice of Billie Holiday propelling us to paradise? The overwhelming amount of news contained in the last section of the book could make our heads spin like our planet. Levine, however, comforts us with the declaration: I knew all this before it happened (54). Context and detail from each poem can be explicated with an online dictionary, plus a glance to Encyclopedia Britannica. Yet, I understand the reader who elects not to explicate each line, since the surface sound and narrative of each poem so satisfies upon first scan.
I cannot help thinking how ironic that the reprint of Philip Levines collection coincides with the last issue of the British tabloid News of the World. The final headline of the weekly issue read Thank You & Goodbye. To Levines collection, a better headline might be thank you and hello.
