Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1995
 
Written in a voice that moves between elegy and prayer, The Simple Truth contains thirty-three poems whose aim is to weave a complex tapestry of myth, history (both public and private), family, memory, and invention in a search for truths so basic and universal they often escape us all. “I am a longtime admirer of Philip Levine’s poetry, but until now I thought he could never surpass The Names of the Lost, a book I love deeply. But The Simple Truth deserves its title—I wonder if any American poet since Walt Whitman himself has written elegies this consistently magnificent. The controlled pathos of every poem in the volume is immense, and gives me a new sense of Levine.”
—Harold Bloom