To These Dark Steps

Gabriel Levin's fourth collection was written in Jerusalem in the shadow of Israel's bombardment and incursion into Gaza in 2008. The title sequence and its prose commentary ("The Fathers are Watching") navigate between war and the mind's need to escape its depredations. The final section of this articulate and compassionate book is a fifteen-sonnet cycle dispatched from an unnamed island, which could be everyman's abode. Little dustbowl brightly lit for Ramadan with your peppermint minaret tops and cannon-fire, greetings from an aging utopist, an orientalist manque . . . Gabriel Levingrew up in the United States and has lived in Jerusalem since 1972.

Levin’s searching spirit deals compassionately and memorably with the mind’s need to disengage itself from the depredations of war.