Except for the addition of fifteen poems culled from Sweet Will (1985) and A Walk with Tom Jefferson (1988), Philip Levine's New Selected Poems is identical with his Selected Poems (1984), right down to pagination and typeface. New Selected Poems, which serves to consolidate the poet's move from his previous publisher to Knopf, will be of interest primarily to readers new to Levine's poetry. New Selected Poems was published simultaneously with What Work Is, a frequently brilliant collection of new poems. The book's recurrent metaphor for work is burning, a metaphor that is introduced in the first poem, "Fear and Fame." After cleaning pickling tanks with a "burning stew" of acids, a worker emerges from the tanks and removes his protective gear: "Ahead lay the second cigarette, held in a shaking hand, / as I took into myself the sickening heat to quell heat, / a lunch of two Genoa salami sandwiches and Swiss cheese / on heavy peasant bread baked by my Aunt Tsipie, / and a third cigarette to kill the taste of the others." Perhaps speaking for the poet too, the vat cleaner returns to his work "stiffened / by the knowledge that to descend and rise up / from the other world merely once in eight hours is half / what it takes to be known among women and men." The ending is evocative, but opaque. To attain fame, this Orpheus who returns from his eight-hour shift in the burning underworld will require something beyond his labor, but what is it—talent, luck, something else?

In another fine poem, "Fire," a father thinks of his son who is off fighting a forest fire and he, the father, vicariously experiences "on my skin, a light oil, a sweat / born of some forgotten leaning into fire." Fire turns to smoke again in "On the River," in which the speaker's brother once a week uses his lunch hour ("his only free time") to row out onto the Detroit River so he can look "with a painter's eye" at the industrial landscape and see "beneath the shadows / of concrete and burned brick towers / the flickering hints of life." The speaker speculates that his brother performs this weekly ritual so he can "behold his own life / come into view brick by dark brick, / bending his back for all its worth, / as the whole thing goes up in smoke." The metaphorical equation of work with burning becomes tendentious in "Burnt," a long poem that constitutes the third section of the book. Though the poem contains some of the best, most compelling writing in the book, as a whole it inclines toward slackness; and the weaker sections, which could easily have been omitted, undermine the good ones.

Occasionally Levine goes on auto-pilot and becomes Philip Levine, tough-guy poet and voice of the common man. You can hear this voice clearly in the title of the book: What Work Is. He knows, you don't, and he's going to tell you. A poem in this mode might begin with an abrupt tough-guy self-righteousness that asserts the speaker's superior sensitivity to the travails of the worker ("Take this quiet woman, she has been / standing before a polishing wheel / for over three hours, and she lacks / twenty minutes before she can take a lunch break. Is she a woman?") and end with heart-of-gold sentimentality ("… she places the five / tapering fingers of her filthy hand / on the arm of your white shirt to mark / you for her own, now and forever"). Another tough-guy ending is the tossed-off cheap shot, such as the conclusion of "Gin," which takes a gratuitous swipe at "the military and political victories / of Dwight Eisenhower, who brought us / Richard Nixon with wife and dog. / Any wonder we tried gin." But such easy preaching to the converted is largely absent from What Work Is. The book is full of lovely, powerful, surprising poems that reaffirm Levine as one of poetry's contemporary masters and the inventor of a distinctive verse line that riffs off of an iambic rhythm while its crisp line breaks derive from Levine's early work with syllabics. The poems in the book's fourth and final section are uniformly superb. Especially incisive, unflinching, funny and compassionate is "The Sweetness of Bobby Hefka." The poem begins with Bobby Hefka sitting in a high school classroom "admitting to Mr. Jaslow / that he was a racist and if Mr. Jaslow / was so tolerant how come he couldn't tolerate Bobby?" Through a funny, heartbreaking series of turns that never seem contrived, the poem manages to end "Bobby Hefka loved me." In What Work Is Philip Levine is a superb poet working at the top of his form.