Philip Levine, U.S. Poet Laureate
Levine was named as poet laureate for the US and in an article in the NYT an excerpt from one of his poems reveals why:
Can you taste
what I’m saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always wrong …
I love the silence he refers to in this last line, but I adore this part of his bio:
Mr. Levine grew up in Detroit, back when it was still a “vital city,” he said. His parents were emigrants from Russia, but for some reason they told him he was of Spanish ancestry, and as a young man he became fascinated with Spanish anarchism and the Spanish Civil War, which still turn up in his poems.