SOURCE: "Working the Night Shift," in New York Times Book Review, September 12, 1982, Sec. 7, p. 42.

In the following review, Tillinghast applauds the poetry in One for the Rose for its readability and declares that "Belief" is one of the age's outstanding poems.

"A good poet," according to Randall Jarrell, "is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times." Among the poems in One for the Rose, the latest of Philip Levine's 10 books of poetry, the lightning strike is unmistakable in "Belief." This poem asserts by denying—using the recurring motif, "No one believes," to capture the ambivalent attitude we take toward things we somehow believe while "knowing" they cannot be true. While insisting upon denial, the poem creates a detailed, compelling vision:

    No one believes that to die
    is beautiful, that after the hard pain
    of the...