Mystical Symphony

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."