New York, Detroit, Fresno, Medford: from a shifting home front, the poet at sixty files his report on "God's Concern / for America." The evidence is not such as to make the poet sanguine. The walls that keep the darkness out are everywhere paper-thin. The news from above is mostly of ourselves: the autumnal sunset brilliant with pollutants, "all the earth we've pumped / into the sky," makes a pageant of doom from the by-products of human hope and industry ("A Walk with Tom Jefferson"). In Fresno, just this side of the fault line, the poet dreams the end of the world ("Waking in March"). The news arrives, bad joke that it is, from the glow above Los Angeles, and the poet can do no more than "go from bed / to bed bowing to the small damp heads / of my sons…." Outside the dream, the children have long since left home, but every parent knows those rounds by heart, knows the fault line panic opens beside the beds and their sweet burdens. The children have fallen asleep imagining that it is safe to do so; the parent, standing for safety, knows that safety is illusion. Who's in charge here? "If I told you that the old woman / named Ida Bellow was shot to death / for no more than $5 and that a baby / of eighteen months saw it all from / where she wakened on the same bed / but can't tell because she can't speak / you'd say I was making it up" ("These Streets").

While America goes to the dogs, the poet with America stuck in his throat rehearses the lessons of his American masters, of Stevens and Whitman ("I Sing the Body Electric"), of Williams ("A Theory of Prosody"), of the carping Yvor Winters ("28"). Levine writes, as the good ones do, to save his life. He also writes a revisionist esthetic of Decline and Fall, retrieving poetry from frontier bravado ("Rexroth / reminiscing on a Berkeley FM station in the voice / God uses to lecture Jesus Christ"). To Whitman's triumphant corporal embrace, to Stevens's pungent oranges and extended wings, Levine replies with the echoing actuarials of Hartford on a Sunday morning ("In my black rain coat I go back / out into the gray morning and dare / the cars on North Indemnity Boulevard / to hit me, but no one wants trouble / at this hour"). To Williams's manifesto on the modernist poetic line ("As the cat / climbed over / the top of // the jamcloset …"), Levine replies with feline Nellie, who "would sit behind me / as I wrote" and paw at the hand that extended a line too far. "The first / time she drew blood I learned / it was poetic to end / a line anywhere to keep her / quiet." To Winters, for whom meter was morality and syntax a hedge against chaos, Levine replies with loopy numerology: the poet at 56 traces the numbered highways of America, the enumerated rehearsals of oblivion (14 hours of fevered sleep, 3 close encounters with death), and the domestic plenum (2 opposing families of 5) back to himself at 28, just half the age of the century, half the age of his newfound mentor (Winters in Los Altos), half the age of the older self who writes this poem. Winters titled his collected prose In Defense of Reason. Levine's bittersweet critique of reason records the patent incapacity of form to structure meaning, all the while making meaning of vaporous coincidence.

Escaping the dead end of swing-shift Detroit for sumptuous California, the artist as a young man delivered himself into the hands of one who, all but forgotten among younger writers now, was a name to conjure with in the middle decades of this century: a poet who came to believe that free verse led to madness, a critic who represented the far right fringe of the canon police, a teacher, bless him, who fostered most passionately those protégés most certain to defect. While Winters presided in the hills of Los Altos and the gentlemen's club of Stanford, the young Levine kept house with two kids and a pregnant wife in East Palo Alto, Stanford's shadow ghetto, an unincorporated stretch of cinderblock and prefab for the un- and the underemployed. For the apprentice poet, California's royal way—El Camino Real—was a divider strip between the good life and real life, a place for poaching lilacs. The poaching has stood him in good stead, evolving a poetry whose range of consciousness and conscience, whose capacity for anger and debunking and sweet recuperation lends heart to the embattled republic, or to those of its citizens with leisure to read.

In the title poem of his new book, Levine takes a mentor of another sort. Brought up from Alabama on the dream of $5 a day, Tom Jefferson, grown old now, tends a garden in the gutted Promised Land, "Between the freeway / and the gray conning towers / of the ballpark" in post-industrial Detroit. Having lost his youth to the auto plant and his son to Korea, Tom Jefferson quotes scripture and pushes a shopping cart through abandoned lots. Tom Jefferson "is a believer. / You can't plant winter vegetables / if you aren't…." Tom Jefferson takes his name from the slave-holding theorist of liberty and "property," revised to the pursuit of happiness. Walking with Tom Jefferson, Levine recalls his own first part in capitalism's long last coma:

      when I worked nights
        on the milling machines
      at Cadillac transmission,
        another kid just up
      from West Virginia asked me
        what was we making,
      and I answered, I'm making
        2.25 an hour,
      don't know what you're
      making, and he had
      to correct me, gently, what was
        we making out of
      this here metal, and I didn't know.

What he ultimately made, of course, was work of another sort. The thirteen bound volumes of that work to date, remarkable intersections of private memory and political fable, will not, unaided, cure what ails us. But in an age more notable for overflowing landfills than for neighborhood renewal, it is much to make poems that heal the breach between ignorance and understanding, labor and wage.