Volume 22, Number 5 · April 3, 1975
Matters of Life and Death
By Robert Mazzocco
1933
by Philip Levine
Atheneum, 68 pp., $3.95 (paper)
Welcome Eumenides
by Eleanor Ross Taylor
Braziller, 55 pp., $5.95
The Death Notebooks
by Anne Sexton
Houghton Mifflin, 98 pp., $2.95 (paper)
The Awful Rowing Toward God
by Anne Sexton
Houghton Mifflin, 86 pp., $3.45 (paper)
Over the last few years Philip Levine has become so striking a poet that I'm surprised he's not more highly valued than he is. Of course he always wrote forceful poems, but were they always so original? An early admired one, 'That Distant Winter,' seems now, in retrospect, not to be Levine at all, has varying echoes of Lowell, Jarrell, Trakl, and some of the dramatic properties of Lawrence's 'The Prussian Officer,' which probably inspired it. Another, equally admired, 'On the Edge,' sits with the ghost of Weldon Kees, who has haunted the poet elsewhere. But it's when we come to his latest collections, They Feed They Lion, published a few years ago, and the recent 1933, that the particular Levine style and strategy continue almost uninterruptedly from page to page. The fine savagery of the earlier volume is manlier, more immediate in its appeal; the later volume is smoother, craftier, a bit muted, but is an advance, I think, deeper, certainly, and more humane.
Review, 5207 words
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