Poetry Center to Host Reading by Pulitzer Prize-Winner Levine

The Smith College Poetry Center will host a reading by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Philip Levine at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, October 20, in Stoddard Auditorium. Levine will read from "The Mercy," a collection of poems published in April 1999. The reading is free and open to the public.

Levine, who lives in Fresno, Calif., has received many awards for his books of poems. In 1991, he won the National Book Award for "What Work Is," a collection of poems that The Washington Book Post World described as "tender without being sentimental, calm but not lacking in passion, written in diction as clear and lucid as spring water." In 1995, Levine won the Pulitzer Prize for "The Simple Truth," a book about which Harold Bloom mused, "I wonder if any American poet since Walt Whitman himself has written elegies this consistently magnificent."

"The Mercy," like the rest of Levine's work, is an exploration of the routines that shape the American experience in the modern world. From these routines, he recalls his own history, his parents' immigration, and the Detroit in which he grew up. However, his vivid and realistic recollections are also accompanied by a sense of the surreal-in stories that arise from imagination rather than experience and in fictional characters that seem caught in the nebulous realm between the empirical and the imagined.

His other works are "New Selected Poems" (1991); "Ashes: Poems New and Old" (1979), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award; "Seven Years From Somewhere" (1979), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; and "The Names of the Lost" (1975), which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He has also published a collection of essays, "The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography" (1994), edited "The Essential Keats" (1987), and co-edited and translated two books: "Off the Map: Selected Poems of Gloria Fuertes" (with Ada Long, 1984) and "Tarumba: The Selected Poems of Jaime Sabines" (with Ernesto Trejo, 1979).

The reading will be followed by bookselling and signing. For more information, call Cindy Furtek in the Poetry Center office at (413) 585-4891 or Ellen Doré Watson, Director, at (413) 585-3368.

September 28, 1999