SOURCE: A review of One for the Rose, in Hudson Review, Vol. XXXV, No. 2, Summer, 1982, pp. 331-33.

In the following excerpt, Grosholz discusses Levine's focus on and praise of the ordinary.

… Philip Levine's poems in One for the Rose often begin in the midst of the ordinary: "This is an ordinary gray Friday after work / and before dark in a city of the known world." Not just anything, however, can count as ordinary, for it is an honorific term which Levine uses to bless things. Bus stations in Ohio are one of his paradigms, and so are small shops, bars and hotels in midwestern cities crossed off with rows of small, shoddy trees and polluted rivers. His people are working people, his times of day the gray mornings before we go to work and the gray dusk we come back home in. The ordinary is what social and...