POETRY

NEW SELECTED POEMS by Philip Levine (Alfred A. Knopf: $15, paper; 292 pp.) This collection was published simultaneously with “What Work Is,” which won the National Book Award for Poetry and a Los Angeles Times Book Award in 1991. It includes selections from all of Levine’s 14 books, except “What Work Is.” “New Selected Poems,” unlike Oliver’s collection, places the earlier poems up front, which is a good thing because the reader is lifted gradually out of the grim, fragile dailiness of the earliest poems: “And what we get is what we bring:/ A grey light coming on at dawn,/ No fresh start and no bird song/ And no sea and no shore/ That someone hasn’t seen before.” Levine grew up in Detroit and worked at several industrial jobs, which is much of what he writes about. The later poems, like the poem “Salami,” are a little more playful, there’s a little more distance from Detroit. Like photographer Lewis Hine, Levine seems to see the larger machine at work. On the frontispiece of my copy of “What Work Is,” Levine wrote: “If you don’t already know, I hope you learn.” This weighs heavy on my heart, since I think I know, but I’m not quite sure.