Philip Levine, a former U.S. poet laureate whose work was alive with the sound, smell and sinew of heavy manual labor, died Saturday at his home in Fresno, Calif. He was 87.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Christopher Buckley, a longtime friend and fellow poet.
Levine served as poet laureate from 2011 to 2012. He received a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for his collection The Simple Truth and won two National Book Awards -- in 1980 for Ashes: Poems New & Old and 1991 for What Work Is. His poetry appeared often in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine and other major publications.
He was a professor emeritus of English at California State University, Fresno, where he had taught from 1958 to 1992.
In spare, realistic free verse, Levine explored the subjects that animated his work for decades: his gritty Detroit childhood; the factory jobs he held as a youth; Spain, where he lived for some time as an adult; and the Spanish anarchists of the 1930s, a personal passion since he was a boy.
"A large, ironic Whitman of the industrial heartland" is how the poet Edward Hirsch, writing in The New York Times Book Review, described Levine in 1984.
His work was not to every critic's taste. Because of its strong narrative thrust, frequent autobiographical bent and tendency to shun conventional poetic devices, some reviewers dismissed it as merely prose with line breaks. Others found monotony in his revisiting the same themes again and again.
Metro on 02/17/2015