New Selected Poems

Philip Levine’s New Selected Poems replaces Selected Poems (1984) by adding to it a generous choice of major work from each of the two volumes that followed it: Sweet Will (1985) and A Walk With Tom Jefferson (1988).

Philip Levine was born in 1928 in Detroit and was formally educated there, at the public schools and at Wayne University (now Wayne State University). After a succession of industrial jobs he left the city for good and lived in various parts of the country before settling in Fresno, California, where he taught at the University until his retirement. He received many awards for his books of poems, including the National Book Award in 1991 for What Work Is, and the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for The Simple Truth. He died in February 2015.