The title of Philip Levine's new collection, 7 Years from Somewhere,… refers to an encounter with Berber herdsmen in North Africa, where the disoriented poet was seeking directions. Though they shared no common language, a fleeting communion was achieved that seems, in retrospect, highly significant to the writer. "I have been lost since," he mourns, "and I could sleep a moment and waken/in the world we made/and will never call ours."…

Although Levine has a better idea of where he's going than most of his contemporaries, a sense of displacement in his work sounds a continual threnody for the disunity of mankind. He is particularly concerned with the class struggle and the resistance to injustice. "A lot of the rage one encounters in contemporary poetry has to do with the political facts of our lives," he has said. But cynics who associate "political poetry" with strident declamation...