A Walk with Tom Jefferson
In his first volume since Sweet Will ( LJ 4/15/85), Levine explores his past (I looked down from great height/ at a burned world I believed/ I never had to enter."). But he did enter this burned world, a world of commerce, the daily "buying and selling" of souls. Levine's power derives from colloquial language fueled by anger. But in some of these 20 poems, anger dissipates to bitterness and his language goes flat. The long title poem, though, is its cornerstone: Levine's Tom Jefferson is a survivor of the consequences of commerceits wars, race riots, urban wastelands. Tom endures, like his winter garden, because he "believes/ the roots need cold,/ the earth needs to turn/ to ice and snow so a new fire/ can start up in the heart/ of all that grows."Robert Hudzik, P.L. of Cincinnati & Hamilton Cty.Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.