SOURCE: A review of A Walk with Tom Jefferson, in Poetry, Vol. CLV, No. 3, December, 1989, pp. 236-39.

In the following review, Gregerson considers some of the major themes in Levine's poetry, both in this collection and elsewhere.

New York, Detroit, Fresno, Medford: from a shifting home front, the poet at sixty files his report on "God's Concern / for America." The evidence is not such as to make the poet sanguine. The walls that keep the darkness out are everywhere paper-thin. The news from above is mostly of ourselves: the autumnal sunset brilliant with pollutants, "all the earth we've pumped / into the sky," makes a pageant of doom from the by-products of human hope and industry ("A Walk with Tom Jefferson"). In Fresno, just this side of the fault line, the poet dreams the end of the world ("Waking in March"). The news arrives, bad joke that it is...