At the Kinnegad Home for the Bewildered

Two hundred years ago, the great rabbi, Simcha Bunim, offered a teaching. Each of us has two pockets. In one, a note reads, "For my sake was the world created"; in the other, "All I am is dust and ash." Take stock of your needs, the rabbi counseled, and reach into the appropriate pocket. In this, his long-awaited third book, Jeffrey Levine offers readers a dazzling redaction of the rabbi's advice. Emptying his innumerable pockets, Levine spills forth poems of radiant image and dialectical thinking. 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," ekphrastic poems that upend tradition. In the poems that grow out of his encounters with paintings by Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and the Scottish painter David Roberts, Levine goes far beyond the spinning out of the image that meets his eye. Poem attaches to painting like a gessoed layer, integral to the painting because integral to the poet -- a secondary self-portrait that offers a glimpse of the artist in mature command of his power both to reveal and conceal.