The simple truth : poems / by Philip Levine.

2011 Poet laureate.

Levine's third book of new verse in six years offers further proof that since turning 60 his drive to explain his relationship to the world has never been stronger. For him, experience and knowledge are not given but are almost consciously wrested from life ("I'm an American,/even before I was fourteen I knew I would have/to create myself"). Though the usual touchstones of his work-adolescence in the 1940s, the death of Garcia Lorca, Detroit's industrial landscape-are ever present, this collection is more consistently narrative and elegiac than previous ones, elevating the minutiae of personal remembrance to an almost mythic significance, which in turn gives way to the larger permanence and mystery of existence as represented by night sky vistas and the forces of history. Levine has been so much imitated that his diction and style are now the standard for much current mainstream poetry; thus, his work sometimes seems all too familiar, but few readers will fail to be moved by its earnest effort to reconcile life as lived both outside and inside the mind.

Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, 1995.