Bücher von Robert Levine

As the book's title implies, the poems in Robert Levine's Mystical Symphony explore sensing, losing, and recovering subtle, intangible connections in the world around us. Their speakers wrestle with their place in and relationship with love, family, nature, current events, faith--and, most of all, themselves. Sometimes Levine embodies this theme in the formal harmony of rhyme and meter, in other instances in the looser cadences of free verse. He can consider these ""mystical"" connections in fittingly hermetic style, but also adopts a more straightforward--yet nonetheless lyrical--voice elsewhere in the collection.Mystical Symphony offers no tricks or formulae for eliciting or sustaining these connections; they remain elusive, evanescent flashes of serendipitous grace. But it concludes with the comfort that, thanks to the memory of experiencing them, ""nothing can take their blessing from me/even after they fly away in my heart.""

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.

Robert Levine offers readers an incisive new take on the mindsets of those who prod, praise, debase, and manipulate others to do things they never thought they'd do - from the point of view of those prodded, praised, and manipulated. He takes a hands--on approach to looking behind the curtain of shilling and pitch by showing pitchmen at work.