The next U.S. Poet Laureate has been announced. It’s Detroit-native Philip Levine.

John Thomas reports: “On the announcement of his being named U.S. Poet Laureate, Librarian of Congress James Billington said, ‘Philip Levine is one of America’s great narrative poets. His plainspoken lyricism has, for half a century, championed the art of telling The Simple Truth — about working in a Detroit auto factory, as he has, and about the hard work we do to make sense of our lives.'”

Here’s a bit of Levine’s work:

The new grass rising in the hills,

the cows loitering in the morning chill,

a dozen or more old browns hidden

in the shadows of the cottonwoods

beside the streambed. I go higher

to where the road gives up and there’s

only a faint path strewn with lupine

between the mountain oaks. (Read on …)