The Mercy Poems Author:Philip Levine Philip Levine's new collection of poems (his first since The Simple Truth was awarded the Pulitzer Prize) is a book of journeys: the necessary ones that each of us takes from innocence to experience, from youth to age, from confusion to clarity, from sanity to madness and back again, from life to death, and occasionally from defeat to tri... more »umph. The book's mood is best captured in the closing lines of the title poem, which takes its name from the ship that brought the poet's mother to America:
A nine-year-old girl travels
all night by train with one suitcase and an orange.