Minutes from A One-Man Meeting

We often feel compelled to adopt different personae for the different environments or obligations life and society place us in--to dissociate the various roles we play and sunder the integrity of the self. Robert Levine have given expression to this theme in Minutes From A One-Man Meeting. The speaker of the title poem at the book's center witnesses the same event in the voices of his different selves: bystander, employee, consumer, citizen, neighbor, son, husband, father, and creature, attaining greater self-unification and connection to the world outside himself as the poem progresses. Reflecting the self-knowledge necessary for this process, the collection begins with a section of poems focusing on their speakers' relationships with lovers, family, nature, God, and themselves; reflecting the duty of the unified self to act in the world at large, the title poem is followed by a section of poems addressing political and social issues like the Iraq war, the recession, and environmental degradation.