Four Quartets: Poetry in the Pandemic

Jeffrey Levine's poems hover and oscillate between moments in and out of time, between states of being and nonbeing, between the body and the body within the body. "What is the imagination's job but to blur one life into the next?" Levine's modus operandi is the process of osmosis and the seepage itself that moves, "drop by rusty drop," through show more porous scrims. This liquid is the ink on Levine's page, the physicality of words that strive to exceed their dictates. In this way, the book's language works like the impasto technique of the poet's beloved Rembrandt, paint layered thickly on paint, to make for a rough surface on which golden light may play and sparkle. "Light the candle, conjure that halo / of amber, reveal the dancing shapes / upon walls that weep with tears of dampness, / the fallen ceilings, the unhinged doors, / through which, bright / moons in the courtyard / glow countless." We need not choose between affirmation and humility, Levine argues, in tones that are at once urgent and agnostic ("The one neither, the other nor"). On the page, at least, we get to have it all: ravishing desire and feasts, prophecies, "night dreads," "a lost thought boxed within a certain light," poems that upend tradition. show less