It seems that many people in reviewing or talking about this collection characterize it as a series of poems about work, and about the factories and plants in which Levine worked for many years, and they claim that this collection more than any other by Levine meditates on these places and experiences in his life. That is not the case at all. It's true, many of Levine's poems are about work and working people, about their toughness and their tenderness. However, we tend to talk about Levine as if he wrote about work the way Bukowski wrote about drinking and women. Many of Levine's poems are about other things besides work. Here there are poems about graves, about ominous chalkboards, about racism, about childhood, about Jewish identity, about perfecting a strike against a dusty punching bag. Levine is one of the greatest poets of twentieth century America, and to reduce him to somebody who jsut wrote about work in the strictest sense is reductive. As the title poem demonstrates, Levine wrote about work in its widest and most human definition: the labor of compassion and humility. ( )

Amazing. What Work Is is one of my favorite poems, and the book itself is filled with dozens of others that might as well be. Philip Levine has a perfect knack for capturing experiences that I think are common to, or at least feel common to, most people. ( )