The Mercy.

• Author: Brouwer, Joel

The Mercy by Philip Levine Alfred A. Knopf. 81 pages. $22.00 (cloth).

Philip Levine's new collection of poems is named for the ship that brought his mother to Ellis Island in 1913. Esther Levine died last year, at the age of ninety-four. These two crossings--one to the new world, one to the next--lie at the heart of The Mercy. This is a book, as Levine has said, that is preoccupied with journeys: "from innocence to experience, and youth to age, and clarity to confusion and back again, and life to death."

Born in Detroit in 1928, Levine grew up in an immigrant community defined by its recent transition to America. In "The New World," he describes the city in the year of his birth: "The women were gaunt. All day the kids dug/in the back lots searching for anything./The place was Russia with another name."

Levine was one of those kids searching for anything, and in Detroit, there wasn't much to find but work--industrial work. He spent most of his twenties laboring in factories and wishing for a way out. "The Communist Party," which first appeared in this magazine, captures the boredom and yearning of that time. The poem describes, at first derisively, a Communist Party meeting Levine and his brother attended in 1948: "Seven single, formal men slowly circling/the scarred ping-pong table with its sagging net ... /a plate of stale saltines, the cheese long gone."

Just when you've begun to think there's nothing on offer here but cynicism--Levine claims he'd only gone in the hope of picking up girls--the tone turns disarmingly candid:

I've partly played this for laughs. It wasn't that funny. The two of us were looking for what we couldn't articulate, and so we said "girls." Were we simply idealists? Here were two intelligent young men working dull industrial jobs, longing for something that would give them a sense of a larger, more vivid existence. At the party's "sad clubhouse," instead of a solution, they find only a handful of other young people with similar, inarticulate yearnings. The poem itself offers no answers, either. It neither glorifies nor mocks--does not, in fact, mention--Communist principles.

In the end, the poem is less about politics than it is about a particularly American ambivalence: the hunger to feel part of something larger than yourself, mixed with a deep distrust of dogmatism. Levine captures the feeling with honesty and good humor.

Levine left Detroit, and factory work, more than forty years ago, but he returns to his...