The Last Shift: Poems / Philip Levine, 79pp.

I may have finally found my poet.  I am able to say that I enjoyed this volume, from start to finish, Levine's last.  He was born in Detroit in 1928 and worked in industry there, which experience is never far from the surface of his poems.  Yes, he was US Poet Laureate, but he was a working man and a midwesterner, and to my ear it's that which makes this writing special.  Take these lines, from "The Angel Bernard:"

...How can the life
 of an angel include a Ford plant
where new life is tortured
 into things? You saw the girl Mary
in a rose gown shyly bowing 
               before a dazzling Gabriel, his pale
                                     wings furled..................................
                                     ......................................................
                                     ...........................When Bernard
                                     bows to dip bread in his coffee
                                     his mother lays one hand down
                                     on his bare nape as though she knows
                                     he will die eleven years from now.......

Both completely accessible and very wise.