Beauty & Forfeiture

The poems in Robert J. Levy’s Beauty & Forfeiture ruminate, with pathos and humor, on life’s vagaries, ranging from the quotidian to the sublime. In lines at once crafted and colloquial, Levy reveals his adherence to the idea that there is another world, and it is in this one, as, in poem after poem, he teases out the unexpected from the dross of the material world. He has an acute eye for the larger themes inherent in life’s minutiae. In Garlic, for example, he eulogizes a kitchen staple, discovering in it a metaphor for the wondrous stink of merely being human. In Wrong, he celebrates human fallibility, asking, Shouldn’t we, tumultuous/ with loss, lose ourselves in this crazed hubbub/ that calls itself a world? Time and again, the poet realizes an uncompromising vision that acknowledges our mortality while finding ultimate meaning, and beauty, in our poignant impermanence in the world.