Starlight | Thematic Issues in Ashes: Poems New and Old
In the following essay, Semansky explores thematic issues of emotional survival in three of Philip Levine's "father" poems in his collection, Ashes: Poems New and Old.
Philip Levine has written a number of poems describing his attempts to come to grips with his father's memory. In Ashes, his 1979 award-winning collection of poems, Levine begins both sections with poems about his father and also ends the book with a poem about him. Together, these poems provide a complex portrait of a man looking for ways to behave in the world, for ways to survive the crush of time.
The opening poem, "Father," describes a nightmarish industrial landscape in which a son searches for his father, both as a child and later as an adult.
The long...
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