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The Mercy
Philip Levine's new collection of poems (his first since The Simple Truth was awarded the Pulitzer Prize) is a book of the necessary ones that each of us takes from innocence to experience, from youth to age, from confusion to clarity, from sanity to madness and back again, from life to death, and occasionally from defeat to triumph. The book's mood is best captured in the closing lines of the title poem, which takes its name from the ship that brought the poet's mother to A nine-year-old girl travels all night by train with one suitcase and an orange. She learns that mercy is something you can eat again and again while the juice spills over your chin, you can wipe it away with the back of your hands and you can never get enough.
- GenresPoetry
97 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
5 people are currently reading
131 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 - 23 of 23 reviews
September 5, 2023
Poignant Memory
Philip Levine was born in Detroit to immigrant Jewish parents. The adjustment his family made to a new land, together with the poverty of the Depression, has made a deep imprint on his writing. He worked at a succession of blue-collar jobs before becoming a professor in Fresno, California. He has received both the National Book award and the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry.
In the poems of "The Mercy", the poet looks back upon incidents in his life or in the lives of those dear to him. The title poem describes his mother's journey to the New World on a ship both aptly and ironically named "The Mercy". The poet looks back at her voyage, including his own research on it, to recapture the shock of the voyage to a then nine year old girl with no English attempting to find her way in a strange land. A related poem earlier in the volume describing an immigrant's reaction to the New World is "Reinventing America." (Perhaps an ironic reference to the reinvention of government theme of the late 1990's)
I think the poems are designed to capture, for the poet and the reader, the details of the small moments of life, remembered and recreated. In "Salt and Oil", one of the fine poems of the collection, Levine describes a process that underlies the theme of memory in the book:
"Three young men in dirty work clothes/ on their way home or to a bar/ in the late morning. This is not/ a photograph, it is a moment/ in the daily life of the world,/ a moment that will pass into the unwritten biography/ of your city or my city/ unless it is frozen in the fine print/ of your eyes."
So Levine etches these moments for us in his poems.
There are poems describing the loss of innocence (as in "Flowering Midnight" which mourns "the lost white world we thought was ours for good.") and poems describing the dissipation, in loneliness even of the lure of sexuality (as in the poem "The Cafe" which describes a bar scene and concludes "the air thickens with smoke, and no one cares/if the two young girls show their thighs or their breasts, some nights/the young men along the bar are too tired even to die.")
Levine is no stranger to the power of music. I found his tribute to Sonny Rollins in "The Unknowable", particularly moving. ("He is merely a man--/after all--a man who stared for years/into the breathy, unknowable voice/of silence and captured the music.")
The poems are in a restrained free verse, in the manner of a chastened and somber Walt Whitman. The poetry also reminds me of the earlier Jewish-American poet, Charles Reznikoff, in its telling vignettes of the lives of ordinary people, its emphasis of a moment, in it use of understatement, and in its reluctance to moralize.
Memory can bring sadness, wisdom, reflection, but it can also result in hope. There is no easy optimism in this collection. This collection is etched sharply with individual recollections of a life. It may help the reader share in the process of looking back with understanding, love, and forbearance.
Robin Friedman
Philip Levine was born in Detroit to immigrant Jewish parents. The adjustment his family made to a new land, together with the poverty of the Depression, has made a deep imprint on his writing. He worked at a succession of blue-collar jobs before becoming a professor in Fresno, California. He has received both the National Book award and the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry.
In the poems of "The Mercy", the poet looks back upon incidents in his life or in the lives of those dear to him. The title poem describes his mother's journey to the New World on a ship both aptly and ironically named "The Mercy". The poet looks back at her voyage, including his own research on it, to recapture the shock of the voyage to a then nine year old girl with no English attempting to find her way in a strange land. A related poem earlier in the volume describing an immigrant's reaction to the New World is "Reinventing America." (Perhaps an ironic reference to the reinvention of government theme of the late 1990's)
I think the poems are designed to capture, for the poet and the reader, the details of the small moments of life, remembered and recreated. In "Salt and Oil", one of the fine poems of the collection, Levine describes a process that underlies the theme of memory in the book:
"Three young men in dirty work clothes/ on their way home or to a bar/ in the late morning. This is not/ a photograph, it is a moment/ in the daily life of the world,/ a moment that will pass into the unwritten biography/ of your city or my city/ unless it is frozen in the fine print/ of your eyes."
So Levine etches these moments for us in his poems.
There are poems describing the loss of innocence (as in "Flowering Midnight" which mourns "the lost white world we thought was ours for good.") and poems describing the dissipation, in loneliness even of the lure of sexuality (as in the poem "The Cafe" which describes a bar scene and concludes "the air thickens with smoke, and no one cares/if the two young girls show their thighs or their breasts, some nights/the young men along the bar are too tired even to die.")
Levine is no stranger to the power of music. I found his tribute to Sonny Rollins in "The Unknowable", particularly moving. ("He is merely a man--/after all--a man who stared for years/into the breathy, unknowable voice/of silence and captured the music.")
The poems are in a restrained free verse, in the manner of a chastened and somber Walt Whitman. The poetry also reminds me of the earlier Jewish-American poet, Charles Reznikoff, in its telling vignettes of the lives of ordinary people, its emphasis of a moment, in it use of understatement, and in its reluctance to moralize.
Memory can bring sadness, wisdom, reflection, but it can also result in hope. There is no easy optimism in this collection. This collection is etched sharply with individual recollections of a life. It may help the reader share in the process of looking back with understanding, love, and forbearance.
Robin Friedman
May 30, 2016
THESE WORDS
In the rainy cold weather of April
the wind deposits scraps of odd letters,
damp ragged stories only partly told
and left this morning outside my back door.
I, who believe in the beauty of words,
dry them in the oven until the paper
curls, and then I begin to decipher
their meaning if there is one or bestow
some meaning on them. On one page I find
my own name repeated over and over
by someone in need of help, a woman
wanting attention or love or money,
a woman I have never met writing
from Lexington. A spurt of rain blurred
some words, so simply printed, but I find
“manic depressive” and “beautiful” on
the same line. She is writing about someone
else, a woman we both know out of
our separate pasts, a woman terribly
in need of my help. An institution
is named, one in Virginia, that admits
such cases. Will I act out of the love
we once had for each other? Will I act
now while there is time? “Phillip,” she writes,
misspelling my name, “you are all that stands
between your cousin Pearl and hopelessness.”
I go to the window. Iris and rose
shiver in the cold wind. My cousin Pearl
died three years ago, alone, in Bellevue,
refusing to see me. “I want you to
remember me as I was,” her note said.
I know that you too receive such letters,
that these words find their way from door to door,
that the words themselves have meaning and are
dignified and beautiful as they march
across these grimy scraps of paper, that
they are all that stands between the darkness
the light suggests is not here and what is
here, words from someone we can never know
that have a meaning we can’t comprehend.
“Door,” she has written, “leaf,” on the page’s
other side, “stone,” words out of poetry,
the words my mother read to Cousin Pearl
forty-nine years ago to comfort her
in her loss. How innocent we were then,
how much we believed in the comfort words
could bring, how much we thought they would explain,
though spring was late, the rain beat on the glass,
beat down on the mounded snow until the streets
ran with the clear ink of its meaning.
In the rainy cold weather of April
the wind deposits scraps of odd letters,
damp ragged stories only partly told
and left this morning outside my back door.
I, who believe in the beauty of words,
dry them in the oven until the paper
curls, and then I begin to decipher
their meaning if there is one or bestow
some meaning on them. On one page I find
my own name repeated over and over
by someone in need of help, a woman
wanting attention or love or money,
a woman I have never met writing
from Lexington. A spurt of rain blurred
some words, so simply printed, but I find
“manic depressive” and “beautiful” on
the same line. She is writing about someone
else, a woman we both know out of
our separate pasts, a woman terribly
in need of my help. An institution
is named, one in Virginia, that admits
such cases. Will I act out of the love
we once had for each other? Will I act
now while there is time? “Phillip,” she writes,
misspelling my name, “you are all that stands
between your cousin Pearl and hopelessness.”
I go to the window. Iris and rose
shiver in the cold wind. My cousin Pearl
died three years ago, alone, in Bellevue,
refusing to see me. “I want you to
remember me as I was,” her note said.
I know that you too receive such letters,
that these words find their way from door to door,
that the words themselves have meaning and are
dignified and beautiful as they march
across these grimy scraps of paper, that
they are all that stands between the darkness
the light suggests is not here and what is
here, words from someone we can never know
that have a meaning we can’t comprehend.
“Door,” she has written, “leaf,” on the page’s
other side, “stone,” words out of poetry,
the words my mother read to Cousin Pearl
forty-nine years ago to comfort her
in her loss. How innocent we were then,
how much we believed in the comfort words
could bring, how much we thought they would explain,
though spring was late, the rain beat on the glass,
beat down on the mounded snow until the streets
ran with the clear ink of its meaning.
December 26, 2018
"The Return" & "Northern Motive" bumped my review to 4 stars. I've enjoyed other collections by Levine more than this one. That's not a negative comment, he's still one of my favorite poets. I rarely give a perfect rating.
June 6, 2019
How many years has he been dead now? Levine keeps living in my imagination and my ear. This might not be his most beloved book, but it certainly reads very well now. Here's a thing I wrote about this a long time ago:
https://annarborobserver.com/articles...
https://annarborobserver.com/articles...
March 15, 2022
Not my favorite type of poetry, but there are some very powerfully written lines throughout the collection. If you enjoy narrative poetry, specifically urban and historical, then you should definitely read it.
December 12, 2018
Rescued this from a free table at a church in Boise when I was in town for a conference. Levine, was a good poet, and these are solid narrative poems. Poetry which is fun to read.
February 18, 2021
Really Enjoyed Levines poems reflecting on family and the past in Detroit. Very much felt like a book honoring his roots after the passing of his mother.
November 7, 2025
i really loved the last couple of poems in this
February 27, 2017
It's the first time I've read Levine and I was surprised and pleased. He grew up in Detroit in the thirties and his first jobs were in places like the Chevy axle plant. Later he left, inspired by poetry and jazz and became a poet spending much of his life in Stockton, a place in many ways like Detroit. He published this book around sixty five and the poems are a sort of summing up of his early life: his family, particularly his mother (The Mercy was the ship she rode to America as a child); working in Detroit in the fifties and some early trips to see what lay beyond. I would say he sees life, especially that of the immigrants who worked in factories or in the fields of California's Great Central Valley as a struggle which they lose sooner or later but that life is full of wonder.
A couple of quotes to give a sense of him:
Of his aunt Tsipie:
A deeply spiritual woman, she could roll
strudel dough so fine even the blind could see through it.
Overweight, 62, worn-out
from mothering three daughters and one husband
- an upholsterer on nights at Dodge Main -
she no longer walked on water or raised
the recently dead. Instead she convened
at noon from her seventh story back porch
with heaven's emissaries, three black crows
perched on the top branches of the neighbourhood's
one remaining oak. Stuffed with strudel,
safely inside the screen door, I heard
her speak out in Ukrainian Yiddish
addressing the three angels by their names.
They would flutter their greasy, savage wings
in warning and settle back. "Fuck with me"
they seemed to say, "You fuck with Him on high."
The hardness of eyes, the sureness of claws,
the incessant caw-cawing of their voices,
the incandescence of feathered wings,
of gleaming beaks, all this she faced down."
From a poem titled "These Words":
"How innocent we were then,
how much we believed in the comfort words
could bring, how much we thought they would explain,
though spring was late, the rain beat on the glass,
beat down on the mounded snow until the streets
ran with the clear ink of its meaning."
A couple of quotes to give a sense of him:
Of his aunt Tsipie:
A deeply spiritual woman, she could roll
strudel dough so fine even the blind could see through it.
Overweight, 62, worn-out
from mothering three daughters and one husband
- an upholsterer on nights at Dodge Main -
she no longer walked on water or raised
the recently dead. Instead she convened
at noon from her seventh story back porch
with heaven's emissaries, three black crows
perched on the top branches of the neighbourhood's
one remaining oak. Stuffed with strudel,
safely inside the screen door, I heard
her speak out in Ukrainian Yiddish
addressing the three angels by their names.
They would flutter their greasy, savage wings
in warning and settle back. "Fuck with me"
they seemed to say, "You fuck with Him on high."
The hardness of eyes, the sureness of claws,
the incessant caw-cawing of their voices,
the incandescence of feathered wings,
of gleaming beaks, all this she faced down."
From a poem titled "These Words":
"How innocent we were then,
how much we believed in the comfort words
could bring, how much we thought they would explain,
though spring was late, the rain beat on the glass,
beat down on the mounded snow until the streets
ran with the clear ink of its meaning."
Read
November 10, 2008I discovered Philip Levine while surfing the Atlantic Monthly (or is it just called Atlantic?) website. Two of his poems really spoke to me: He would Never Use One Word Where None Would Do and The Return. I especially liked He would Never Use One Word Where None Would Do because at the time I was dealing with someone who talked non-stop about every intimate detail of his life- and it drove me crazy.
Read
September 23, 2007Levine is one of the most lively poets whose books I've read or who I've heard read in person. His Detroit steel background melds with the tough-soft potrayals of characters, dialogue, and vivid settings. Like a good short story with a beginning, middle, and end, Levine leaves the reader feeling complete. Philip Levine
June 20, 2015
I feel with Philip Levine such a plain emotional connection. all of his poetry feels so grounded, feels so much like stories being passed down to me. his work is a kind of midwestern mythology, and the longer you read it, the more familiar you become with the characters and geography. There's no required previous reading for this collection. It'd make a great introduction to his work.
Want to read
September 18, 2011I had the privilege of hearing him read a few of his poems a couple nights ago at the Univ. of MDCP and he was captivating. I look forward to poring over his work and recapturing what I felt that night.
May 7, 2013
This is my first time reading Philip Levine, and it was a happy discovery. A number of the poems are gritty and memorable, yet a number also seem to fall off and Levine doesn't really pull them off. All in all, powerful, memorable, yet uneven.
November 23, 2016
Philip Levine captures people at poignant moments in time where simple acts seem like a gift of mercy. The rich emotional overtones help paint the experience beyond the setting and people. He uses a storytelling mode, that entices the reader into the collection and into each poem.
October 9, 2007
I was about halfway through this when I lent it to Ryler before he left on tour. It was okay - so far Levine isn't my cup of tea, but he's definitely a good writer.
October 21, 2008
I loved the front cover photo
Read
May 10, 2009Meh
July 31, 2012
This is the guy I want to take to a smokey bar after a long week just to have him buy me a shot of whiskey and tell me what it feels like going down.
March 13, 2013
Maybe my favorite collection of his...though I haven't read each of his books. My personal favorite poem from this collection is 'After Leviticus'. Think about the title after you've read it...
March 26, 2014
Fascinating blue-collar, working-class poetry which beautifully invokes a crushing industrial landscape and the endless struggle of its denizens to carve out decent, human lives within it.
September 23, 2014
One of the first books Guion lent me when we started dating.
Read
April 3, 2012King Library (2nd floor) | PS3562.E9 M47 1999
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews