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The Last Shift: Poems
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 the gifts of winter, dawn, a wall in Naples, an English hilltop, Andalusia. And he makes peace with "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."
- GenresPoetry
97 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 8, 2016
19 people are currently reading
170 people want to read
About the author
Philip Levine
138 books154 followersPhilip Levine (b. January 10, 1928, Detroit, Michigan. d. February 14, 2015, Fresno, California) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet best known for his poems about working-class Detroit.
He taught for over thirty years at the English Department of California State University, Fresno and held teaching positions at other universities as well. He is appointed to serve as the Poet Laureate of the United States for 2011–2012.
Philip Levine grew up in industrial Detroit, the second of three sons and the first of identical twins of Jewish immigrant parents. His father, Harry Levine owned a used auto parts business, his mother Esther Priscol (Prisckulnick) Levine was a bookseller. When Levine was five years old, his father died. Growing up, he faced the anti-Semitism embodied by the pro-Hitler radio priest Father Coughlin.
Levine started to work in car manufacturing plants at the age of 14. He graduated from Detroit Central High School in 1946 and went to college at Wayne University (now Wayne State University) in Detroit, where he began to write poetry, encouraged by his mother, to whom he later dedicated the book of poems The Mercy. Levine got his A.B. in 1950 and went to work for Chevrolet and Cadillac in what he calls "stupid jobs". He married his first wife Patty Kanterman in 1951. The marriage lasted until 1953. In 1953 he went to the University of Iowa without registering, studying among others with poets Robert Lowell and John Berryman, the latter of which Levine called his "one great mentor". In 1954 he graduated with a mail-order masters degree with a thesis on John Keats' "Ode to Indolence", and married actress Frances J. Artley. He returned to the University of Iowa teaching technical writing, completing his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1957. The same year, he was awarded the Jones Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University. In 1958 he joined the English Department at California State University in Fresno, where he taught until his retirement in 1992. He has also taught at many other universities, among them New York University as Distinguished Writer-in-Residence, at Columbia, Princeton, Brown, Tufts, and the University of California at Berkeley.
He taught for over thirty years at the English Department of California State University, Fresno and held teaching positions at other universities as well. He is appointed to serve as the Poet Laureate of the United States for 2011–2012.
Philip Levine grew up in industrial Detroit, the second of three sons and the first of identical twins of Jewish immigrant parents. His father, Harry Levine owned a used auto parts business, his mother Esther Priscol (Prisckulnick) Levine was a bookseller. When Levine was five years old, his father died. Growing up, he faced the anti-Semitism embodied by the pro-Hitler radio priest Father Coughlin.
Levine started to work in car manufacturing plants at the age of 14. He graduated from Detroit Central High School in 1946 and went to college at Wayne University (now Wayne State University) in Detroit, where he began to write poetry, encouraged by his mother, to whom he later dedicated the book of poems The Mercy. Levine got his A.B. in 1950 and went to work for Chevrolet and Cadillac in what he calls "stupid jobs". He married his first wife Patty Kanterman in 1951. The marriage lasted until 1953. In 1953 he went to the University of Iowa without registering, studying among others with poets Robert Lowell and John Berryman, the latter of which Levine called his "one great mentor". In 1954 he graduated with a mail-order masters degree with a thesis on John Keats' "Ode to Indolence", and married actress Frances J. Artley. He returned to the University of Iowa teaching technical writing, completing his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1957. The same year, he was awarded the Jones Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University. In 1958 he joined the English Department at California State University in Fresno, where he taught until his retirement in 1992. He has also taught at many other universities, among them New York University as Distinguished Writer-in-Residence, at Columbia, Princeton, Brown, Tufts, and the University of California at Berkeley.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews
December 31, 2016
The final collection of poetry by one of my favorite authors. Levine's work clumps into four basic categories, which I rate in descending order of interest: 1) Poems about living and working in post-WWII Detroit; 2) poems about his family and their heritage; 3) pastoral poems about the landscape of central California, where he lived and taught for the last part of his life; and 4) poems about the folks he met in his travels as a young man, mostly around the Mediterranean. There are plenty of poems from categories 1, 2, and 4 in this collection. My two favorites bookend the book: "Inheritance," ostensibly about his grandfather's watch; and "The Last Shift," which imagines Levine's passage into death, all those memories of the Detroit of his youth being the last ones to give up the ghost. To be honest, this collection is a mixed bag. There are some clunkers, particularly a few of the European travel poems. As a whole, it is not Levine's best collection. But I am not going to quibble. I was just happy to read a final book of poetry from this man. Thanks, Mr. Levine. You will be missed.
December 9, 2024
For National Poetry Month I purchased poetry books that had been on my 'wish list' for some time.
I was interested in reading several poets with Detroit roots and who had written about Detroit.
Although I am not a native Detroiter, my family moved to Metro Detroit in 1963 when I was ten. My father found work with Chrysler in Highland Park where he was an experimental mechanic.
The poems in Philip Levine's book The Last Shift are also accessible, "human centered poetry" as the Forward states. He writes about growing up and working at the Hamtramck Chevy Gear & Axle.
In an article about the book, Thomas Curwen of the Los Angeles Times wrote,
...Levine’s poems — with their pictures of the industrial Midwest animated by despair, yearning and love — suggest a more troubling truth. The working class has always been hard to see because seeing would mean confronting the struggle of their lives, a struggle of race, inequity and inequality.
“I think the writing of a poem is a political act,” Levine told an interviewer in 1974. “The sources of anger are frequently social, and they have to do with the fact that people’s lives are frustrated, they’re lied to, they’re cheated, that there is no equitable handing out of the goods of this world.”
My father never worked on the line, but I had an uncle and cousins who did work in assembly plants in the 1970s and later, and my husband worked as a welder for two summers at the Flint Buick plant during college breaks. Levine captures the experience for an earlier generation.
...Remember
at eighteen, brother, at Cadillac
Transmission how no one
knew what we were drilling holes into or why except
of course for $3.85
an hour.
More Than You Gave is filled with images that were very real to me."An ordinary Tuesday in ordinary times," he mentions psoriasis, which my mother suffered from. And notes "the teenage Woodward Ave. whores;" one once tried to get into my dad's truck while he was waiting to pick up a work friend. And White Owl cigars, my dad's brand in the 1960s. "It could be worse," he writes, they could work "at Ford Rogue where the young get old fast or die trying."
I recall the obligatory annual school trips to the Rouge River forge, described by Levine:
One spring day
the whole class went by bus
to the foundry at Ford Rogue
to see earth melted and
poured like syrup into fire.
A Dozen Dawn Songs, Plus One looks back across "2,000 miles and fifty years" and ends,"Oh/to be young and strong and dumb/again in Michigan!"
And in Godspell he writes, "A lifetime passes/in the blink of an eye/ You look back and think,/That was heaven, so of course it had to end."
And in the final poem, The Last Shift, he sees the Packard Plant in the moonlight, the 1903 Alfred Kahn complex that spread over forty acres. After it closed in 1999, and scrappers stripped it, the Packard Plant came to symbolize Detroit's decay.
I enjoyed reading these poems .
I was interested in reading several poets with Detroit roots and who had written about Detroit.
Although I am not a native Detroiter, my family moved to Metro Detroit in 1963 when I was ten. My father found work with Chrysler in Highland Park where he was an experimental mechanic.
The poems in Philip Levine's book The Last Shift are also accessible, "human centered poetry" as the Forward states. He writes about growing up and working at the Hamtramck Chevy Gear & Axle.
In an article about the book, Thomas Curwen of the Los Angeles Times wrote,
...Levine’s poems — with their pictures of the industrial Midwest animated by despair, yearning and love — suggest a more troubling truth. The working class has always been hard to see because seeing would mean confronting the struggle of their lives, a struggle of race, inequity and inequality.
“I think the writing of a poem is a political act,” Levine told an interviewer in 1974. “The sources of anger are frequently social, and they have to do with the fact that people’s lives are frustrated, they’re lied to, they’re cheated, that there is no equitable handing out of the goods of this world.”
My father never worked on the line, but I had an uncle and cousins who did work in assembly plants in the 1970s and later, and my husband worked as a welder for two summers at the Flint Buick plant during college breaks. Levine captures the experience for an earlier generation.
...Remember
at eighteen, brother, at Cadillac
Transmission how no one
knew what we were drilling holes into or why except
of course for $3.85
an hour.
More Than You Gave is filled with images that were very real to me."An ordinary Tuesday in ordinary times," he mentions psoriasis, which my mother suffered from. And notes "the teenage Woodward Ave. whores;" one once tried to get into my dad's truck while he was waiting to pick up a work friend. And White Owl cigars, my dad's brand in the 1960s. "It could be worse," he writes, they could work "at Ford Rogue where the young get old fast or die trying."
I recall the obligatory annual school trips to the Rouge River forge, described by Levine:
One spring day
the whole class went by bus
to the foundry at Ford Rogue
to see earth melted and
poured like syrup into fire.
A Dozen Dawn Songs, Plus One looks back across "2,000 miles and fifty years" and ends,"Oh/to be young and strong and dumb/again in Michigan!"
And in Godspell he writes, "A lifetime passes/in the blink of an eye/ You look back and think,/That was heaven, so of course it had to end."
And in the final poem, The Last Shift, he sees the Packard Plant in the moonlight, the 1903 Alfred Kahn complex that spread over forty acres. After it closed in 1999, and scrappers stripped it, the Packard Plant came to symbolize Detroit's decay.
I enjoyed reading these poems .
August 8, 2022
sharp, refreshing. personal & honest in a way a lot of poetry lacks
"You look back and think, That was heaven, so of course it had to end."
"You look back and think, That was heaven, so of course it had to end."
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October 21, 2025Oh / to be young and strong and dumb /again in Michigan
November 10, 2016
"and no one cares if we sing to the orange sun
that also seeks its rest, no one cares that our voices
are harsh from cigarettes and our ears are worthless,
our timing off, and we've got the right words
in the wrong places. Let's just give it what we have
and when that's done give it a second time, one
for us and one for Nate, and even a third wouldn't hurt."
-excerpt from "More Than You Gave"
that also seeks its rest, no one cares that our voices
are harsh from cigarettes and our ears are worthless,
our timing off, and we've got the right words
in the wrong places. Let's just give it what we have
and when that's done give it a second time, one
for us and one for Nate, and even a third wouldn't hurt."
-excerpt from "More Than You Gave"
July 29, 2017
My heart breaks reading this knowing it was his last work. Thank you Mr. Levine for working one last shift.
September 10, 2023
Standouts: 1934, The Absent Gardener, History, Godspell, The Last Shift.
October 2, 2021
Favorites:
The Last Shift
Your Turn
Leaves
Pennsylvania Pastoral
Quotes:
...Not even Aesop could outdo our Nate,
our fabulist, whose name even is pure invention,
a confabulation of his prison reading and his twelve-year
formal education in the hobo camps of his long boyhood.
Wanderlust, he tells us, hit him at age fifteen and not
a moment too son, for Mr. Wilson was taking boys
off to die in Europe and that was just about the time
women discovered Nate or Nate discovered women,
and they were something he wouldn't care to go without.
Call it a long day if you want and a hard one, too,
but remember we got more than we gave: we got myth,
we got music, we got underpaid work, a cheap lunch
with more to follow. On the long walk to the bus stop
and the ride home we hear the birds gathering
in the elms and maples thickening with summer finery,
and no one cares if we sing to the orange sun
that also seeks its rest, no one cares that our voices
are harsh from cigarettes and our ears worthless,
our timing off, and we've got the wrong words
in the wrong places. Let's just give it what we have
and when that's done give it a second time, one
for us and one for Nate, and even a third wouldn't hurt.
The Last Shift
Your Turn
Leaves
Pennsylvania Pastoral
Quotes:
...Not even Aesop could outdo our Nate,
our fabulist, whose name even is pure invention,
a confabulation of his prison reading and his twelve-year
formal education in the hobo camps of his long boyhood.
Wanderlust, he tells us, hit him at age fifteen and not
a moment too son, for Mr. Wilson was taking boys
off to die in Europe and that was just about the time
women discovered Nate or Nate discovered women,
and they were something he wouldn't care to go without.
Call it a long day if you want and a hard one, too,
but remember we got more than we gave: we got myth,
we got music, we got underpaid work, a cheap lunch
with more to follow. On the long walk to the bus stop
and the ride home we hear the birds gathering
in the elms and maples thickening with summer finery,
and no one cares if we sing to the orange sun
that also seeks its rest, no one cares that our voices
are harsh from cigarettes and our ears worthless,
our timing off, and we've got the wrong words
in the wrong places. Let's just give it what we have
and when that's done give it a second time, one
for us and one for Nate, and even a third wouldn't hurt.
February 23, 2024
"I'm doing my feeble best to entrance you
without a broad palette of the colors
which can make a thing like nothing
else, make it come alive with the grubby
texture all things actually possess
after the wind and weather batter them
the way all my years battered
my tongue and teeth until whatever
I say comes out sounding inaccurate,
wrong, ugly. Yes, ugly, the way a wall
becomes after whoever was meant
to be kept out or kept in has been
transformed perfectly into the light
and dust that collect constantly
on each object in a living world."
In the last collection before his death, Philip Levine writes about what he knows: his life, those he knew, his jobs, and experiences. There is an honesty to his poetry, to his words, that cannot be contended with. So many of the pieces have an ease to them, as if he barely had to lift a pen to get them out; but this (apparent) ease does not mean we should take the work lightly. On the contrary, what Levine has bestowed upon us carries the same weight and severity as any great piece of art on display in a museum. He was a truly gifted poet.
without a broad palette of the colors
which can make a thing like nothing
else, make it come alive with the grubby
texture all things actually possess
after the wind and weather batter them
the way all my years battered
my tongue and teeth until whatever
I say comes out sounding inaccurate,
wrong, ugly. Yes, ugly, the way a wall
becomes after whoever was meant
to be kept out or kept in has been
transformed perfectly into the light
and dust that collect constantly
on each object in a living world."
In the last collection before his death, Philip Levine writes about what he knows: his life, those he knew, his jobs, and experiences. There is an honesty to his poetry, to his words, that cannot be contended with. So many of the pieces have an ease to them, as if he barely had to lift a pen to get them out; but this (apparent) ease does not mean we should take the work lightly. On the contrary, what Levine has bestowed upon us carries the same weight and severity as any great piece of art on display in a museum. He was a truly gifted poet.
October 16, 2018
I wish I could remember where I heard this poet mentioned. His name was new to me, so it’s a bit ironic that I’m starting with his last book of poems, published posthumously after his death in 2015, to explore his work. I might make this a habit. There’s something crystallized in a writer’s words when they know they are reaching the end. There’s an essentialism that makes me take notice and wonder about my own. With much of his life spent working in Detroit factories, Philip Levine is often described as the poet of the working man. This slim collection of poems made the perfect companion to my own recent reflection on the nature of calling in one’s work.
September 15, 2020
I especially enjoyed section 1 (of three) that featured looks back to life in the past in Middle America for Jewish immigrants. The poems are so good, so moving, and so accessible you keep pinching yourself, asking yourself “why don’t I read more poetry?”
The first third is so strong it carries the less accessible poems in the latter sections. Some are good, some obscure, but overall these sections don’t have the clarity and focus of the first section.
Except for the final titular poem: it’s a beautiful piece of work and a very strong closing to an overall strong collection. Highly recommended for all readers.
The first third is so strong it carries the less accessible poems in the latter sections. Some are good, some obscure, but overall these sections don’t have the clarity and focus of the first section.
Except for the final titular poem: it’s a beautiful piece of work and a very strong closing to an overall strong collection. Highly recommended for all readers.
November 17, 2021
Philip Levine's final volume of poetry, The Last Shift is an array of pictures in his life both real and imagined. He also sings praises to artists, and workers who like himself worked shifts in factories producing goods. The understanding of the complexities of life comes through in the poems Urban Myths, Postcards and in Another Country. In the Angel Bernard, an encounter with this angel seems to predict and early death or a change in form. The poem The Last Shift seems to summarize his life as a worker and his life as it ebbs to an end. Scenes of the past move by and are viewed with a calm reverence and appreciation. A beautiful final compilation from a renowned poet.
November 16, 2018
If you love T.S.Eliot, and, more importantly, if you love T.S.Eliot AND Robert Frost, you will love this volume of poetry. I read many of these pieces aloud after swimming in them silently, and cannot possibly believe it has taken me 60 human years to stumble upon this genius. Images from Brooklyn, Manhattan, California and industrial 1950's Detroit, all indelible and I promise to revisit this. I am putting every Philip Levine work on my wish list.
August 12, 2019
I'm not a huge fan of poetry. I understand it but often only when it rhymes. Philip Levine writes about his time in Detroit, working the assembly lines and life does not appear to be good. He writes of sadness and change, of dreams never reached. It is not an uplifting read, but then again, it is about the Last Shift. Does that mean at the plant or in life? It was his last collection of poems before he died. I hope I am a bit more cheerful about my life before I go.
January 9, 2022
When Philip Levine passed away in 2015, the Pulitzer-prize winning poet left behind a last collection of his work to be published posthumously. The lyrical poems in this collection touch on every aspect of his life, from the gritty underbelly of Detroit’s auto plants to the bucolic landscape of central California to the jazz clubs and artist studios he loved. A wonderful final collection by one of the all-time greats.
May 7, 2018
A beautiful collection of poems selected from a lifetime of astute observation.
from Godspell:
There was a season of snails, cankers, green slugs,
gophers I never saw, and then a short autumn
without a harvest, and the brown vines I tried
to burn with that year's leaves. A lifetime passes
in the blink of an eye. You look back and think,
That was heaven, so of course it had to end.
from Godspell:
There was a season of snails, cankers, green slugs,
gophers I never saw, and then a short autumn
without a harvest, and the brown vines I tried
to burn with that year's leaves. A lifetime passes
in the blink of an eye. You look back and think,
That was heaven, so of course it had to end.
July 4, 2017
Selected this book after reading a review in the New York Review of Books. His ties to past, family, and places he traveled could best be appreciated by someone with a similar life experience. A generation gap stood in my way. Will try a different volume perhaps because his style has a flow.
February 7, 2017
His last collection of poems. I enjoyed it more than some of his earlier works. Here he is not so caught up in the working class us vs. them but broadens his viewpoint.
June 2, 2017
Philip Levine's final collection has everything you could want, really. It's the poetry of geography and nostalgia you come to expect from him.
June 11, 2017
The last volume from one of my favorite poets.
June 24, 2017
Poetry of work... much to think about here.
July 28, 2017
This last collection by Levine captures the humanity, humility, and humor of Levine's poetry. It may not be his best work but it varies the best of his aesthetic concerns.
November 4, 2017
Philip Levine is a master poet, I just prefer his other collections. This one was actually put together by someone else (his inheritor), after his death.
May 12, 2018
wonderful
February 18, 2020
This is Philip Levine's final collection of poetry before his death, and the work really does have a finality to it.
April 4, 2022
A fine collection of late Levine with various locales resulting in shifts in tone. Highly recommended.
February 21, 2023
Beautifully written final collection from one of my favorites of the poets laureate.
December 30, 2016
perfect
January 30, 2017
The final collection of poems selected by Philip Levine (1928-2015), National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner, and the former Poet Laureate of the United States.
Poetry Review: The Last Shift may not be Philip Levine's strongest collection of poems, but it is a representative one, sampling topics from all areas of his life and thoughts. Something like a "Best of" record, he returns to moments reminiscent of a number of his previous works. The Last Shift is not only the title of the fine final poem of the collection, but an appropriate title for the final book by this proud poet of the working class. One of his collections was titled What Work Is (winner of the 1991 National Book Award), not a topic often addressed by American poets. One of the striking attributes of this book, a useful primer for all learning poets, is just what a fine craftsman Levine is, how well these poems are written, how well put together, how well he expresses his thoughts. Anyone could learn much from the poems in this book, how to construct a poem, how to choose the right words, how to say enough without saying too much ("each in her best flowered dress,/each with her worn Bible in hand"). And then there are the subjects and the language. Levine writes of things that are used, are worn, that are touched and felt: "armies of picks/and shovels, their handles/stained with our fathers' lives." He ends that poem with simple beauty:
All that's left
are these few unread words
without rhythm or breath
fading before your eyes.
At times he touches on the Spanish poets and the Biblical (Psalm 137):
By the waters of the Llobregat
no one sits down to weep for the children
of the world, by the Ebro, the Tagus,
the Guadalquivir, by the waters
of the world no one sits down and weeps.
The Last Shift is a book of history, of memories, memories of his youth in Detroit, labor, women, work, angels, family, travel.
A lifetime passes
in the blink of an eye. You look back and think,
That was heaven, so of course it had to end.
Or even,
Oh
to be young and strong and dumb
again in Michigan!
Perhaps Levine's whole life is wrapped up in these pages, he selected these poems, showing his skill and his dreams, and in these pages you can find all the poems he ever wrote, just in other words. He's written his own elegy. [3½★]
Poetry Review: The Last Shift may not be Philip Levine's strongest collection of poems, but it is a representative one, sampling topics from all areas of his life and thoughts. Something like a "Best of" record, he returns to moments reminiscent of a number of his previous works. The Last Shift is not only the title of the fine final poem of the collection, but an appropriate title for the final book by this proud poet of the working class. One of his collections was titled What Work Is (winner of the 1991 National Book Award), not a topic often addressed by American poets. One of the striking attributes of this book, a useful primer for all learning poets, is just what a fine craftsman Levine is, how well these poems are written, how well put together, how well he expresses his thoughts. Anyone could learn much from the poems in this book, how to construct a poem, how to choose the right words, how to say enough without saying too much ("each in her best flowered dress,/each with her worn Bible in hand"). And then there are the subjects and the language. Levine writes of things that are used, are worn, that are touched and felt: "armies of picks/and shovels, their handles/stained with our fathers' lives." He ends that poem with simple beauty:
All that's left
are these few unread words
without rhythm or breath
fading before your eyes.
At times he touches on the Spanish poets and the Biblical (Psalm 137):
By the waters of the Llobregat
no one sits down to weep for the children
of the world, by the Ebro, the Tagus,
the Guadalquivir, by the waters
of the world no one sits down and weeps.
The Last Shift is a book of history, of memories, memories of his youth in Detroit, labor, women, work, angels, family, travel.
A lifetime passes
in the blink of an eye. You look back and think,
That was heaven, so of course it had to end.
Or even,
Oh
to be young and strong and dumb
again in Michigan!
Perhaps Levine's whole life is wrapped up in these pages, he selected these poems, showing his skill and his dreams, and in these pages you can find all the poems he ever wrote, just in other words. He's written his own elegy. [3½★]
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February 28, 2017"Many of these poems of the past are narrated in present tense precisely because the past was always vividly present for Levine. The experiences, images, and emotions of that period of his life became inescapable, regardless of time and geographical distance; they “kept going / on and on into the present,” so that even in a distant other country we find him describing an angry, thieving world: “I heard / an angry sea rising against the shore / below my balcony and the winds / raiding the pines and knew morning / would break on a different world.” He well knew how the world’s weather can alter us forever, especially the young who may have no other experiences to counter or resist the destructive forces that twist and subdue them. We hear Levine lament repeatedly in another poem that “no one sits down to weep for the children / . . . no one sits down and weeps.” " - Fred Dings
This book was reviewed in the March/April 2017 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website:
https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/...
This book was reviewed in the March/April 2017 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website:
https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/...
Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews