{"product_id":"the-mercy-isbn-9780375701351","title":"The Mercy","description":"Philip Levine's new collection of poems (his first since \u003cb\u003eThe Simple Truth\u003c\/b\u003e was awarded the Pulitzer Prize) is a book of journeys: 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 America: 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.\"Narrative poems of remarkable honesty and beauty--lines that speak softly and need not raise their voice to capture our full attention.\"\u003cbr\u003e-- Sarah Manguso, \u003ci\u003eBoston Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eThe Mercy\u003c\/i\u003e is a book for the twenty-first century, revealing the diversity out of which Americans emerged and toward which we continue . . . In our rapidly changing world, we need such vision.\"\u003cbr\u003e--Kate Daniels, \u003ci\u003eSouthern Review\u003c\/i\u003ePhilip Levine was born in 1928 in Detroit, where he was formally educated in the public schools and at Wayne University (now Wayne State University). After a succession of industrial jobs, he left the country before settling in Fresno, California, where he taught at the university there until his retirement. He has received many awards for his books of poems, most recently the National Book Award in 1991 for \u003cb\u003eWhat Work Is\u003c\/b\u003e, and the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for \u003cb\u003eThe Simple Truth\u003c\/b\u003e.The Unknowable \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePracticing his horn on the Williamsburg Bridge \u003cbr\u003ehour after hour, \"woodshedding\" the musicians \u003cbr\u003ecalled it, but his woodshed was the world. \u003cbr\u003eThe enormous tone he borrowed from Hawkins \u003cbr\u003ethat could fill a club to overflowing \u003cbr\u003eblown into tatters by the sea winds \u003cbr\u003eteaching him humility, which he carries \u003cbr\u003ewith him at all times, not as an amulet \u003cbr\u003eagainst the powers of animals and men \u003cbr\u003ethat mean harm or the lure of the marketplace. \u003cbr\u003eNo, a quality of the gaze downward \u003cbr\u003eon the streets of Brooklyn or Manhattan. \u003cbr\u003eHold his hand and you'll see it, hold his eyes \u003cbr\u003ein yours and you'll hear the wind singing \u003cbr\u003ethrough the cables of the bridge that was home, \u003cbr\u003esinging through his breath--no rarer than yours, \u003cbr\u003ethough his became the music of the world \u003cbr\u003ethirty years ago. Today I ask myself \u003cbr\u003ehow he knew the time had come to inhabit \u003cbr\u003ethe voice of the air and how later \u003cbr\u003ehe decided the time had come for silence, \u003cbr\u003efor the world to speak any way it could? \u003cbr\u003eHe wouldn't answer because he'd find \u003cbr\u003ethe question pompous. He plays for money. \u003cbr\u003eThe years pass, and like the rest of us \u003cbr\u003ehe ages, his hair and beard whiten, the great \u003cbr\u003eshoulders narrow. He is merely a man-- \u003cbr\u003eafter all--a man who stared for years \u003cbr\u003einto the breathy, unknowable voice \u003cbr\u003eof silence and captured the music. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Return\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAll afternoon my father drove the country roads\u003cbr\u003ebetween Detroit and Lansing. What he was looking for\u003cbr\u003eI never learned, no doubt because he never knew himself,\u003cbr\u003ethough he would grab any unfamiliar side road\u003cbr\u003eand follow where it led past fields of tall sweet corn\u003cbr\u003ein August or in winter those of frozen sheaves.\u003cbr\u003eOften he'd leave the Terraplane beside the highway\u003cbr\u003eto enter the stunned silence of mid-September,\u003cbr\u003ehis eyes cast down for a sign, the only music\u003cbr\u003ehis own breath or the wind tracking slowly through\u003cbr\u003ethe stalks or riding above the barren ground. Later\u003cbr\u003ehe'd come home, his dress shoes coated with dust or mud,\u003cbr\u003ehis long black overcoat stained or tattered\u003cbr\u003eat the hem, sit wordless in his favorite chair,\u003cbr\u003ehis necktie loosened, and stare at nothing. At first\u003cbr\u003emy brothers and I tried conversation, questions\u003cbr\u003eonly he could answer: Why had he gone to war?\u003cbr\u003eWhere did he learn Arabic? Where was his father?\u003cbr\u003eI remember none of this. I read it all later,\u003cbr\u003eyears later as an old man, a grandfather myself,\u003cbr\u003ein a journal he left my mother with little drawings\u003cbr\u003eof ruined barns and telephone poles, receding\u003cbr\u003etoward a future he never lived, aphorisms\u003cbr\u003efrom Montaigne, Juvenal, Voltaire, and perhaps a few\u003cbr\u003eof his own: \"He who looks for answers finds questions.\"\u003cbr\u003eThree times he wrote, \"I was meant to be someone else,\"\u003cbr\u003eand went on to describe the perfumes of the damp fields.\u003cbr\u003e\"It all starts with seeds,\" and a pencil drawing\u003cbr\u003eof young apple trees he saw somewhere or else dreamed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI inherited the book when I was almost seventy\u003cbr\u003eand with it the need to return to who we were.\u003cbr\u003eIn the Detroit airport I rented a Taurus;\u003cbr\u003ethe woman at the counter was bored or crazy:\u003cbr\u003eDid I want company? she asked; she knew every road\u003cbr\u003efrom here to Chicago. She had a slight accent,\u003cbr\u003eDutch or German, long black hair, and one frozen eye.\u003cbr\u003eI considered but decided to go alone,\u003cbr\u003edetermined to find what he had never found.\u003cbr\u003eSlowly the autumn morning warmed, flocks of starlings\u003cbr\u003erose above the vacant fields and blotted out the sun.\u003cbr\u003eI drove on until I found the grove of apple trees\u003cbr\u003eheavy with fruit, and left the car, the motor running,\u003cbr\u003ebeside a sagging fence, and entered his life\u003cbr\u003eon my own for maybe the first time. A crow welcomed\u003cbr\u003eme home, the sun rode above, austere and silent,\u003cbr\u003ethe early afternoon was cloudless, perfect.\u003cbr\u003eWhen the crow dragged itself off to another world,\u003cbr\u003ethe shade deepened slowly in pools that darkened around\u003cbr\u003ethe trees; for a moment everything in sight stopped.\u003cbr\u003eThe wind hummed in my good ear, not words exactly,\u003cbr\u003enot nonsense either, nor what I spoke to myself,\u003cbr\u003ejust the language creation once wakened to.\u003cbr\u003eI took off my hat, a mistake in the presence\u003cbr\u003eof my father's God, wiped my brow with what I had,\u003cbr\u003ethe back of my hand, and marveled at what was here:\u003cbr\u003enothing at all except the stubbornness of things.","brand":"Knopf","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304204718309,"sku":"NP9780375701351","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375701351.jpg?v=1767740478","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-mercy-isbn-9780375701351","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}