Peering Into Infinity: Mirrors of Love & Grief By Steven Lewis — Grief, Unarmored

Peering Into Infinity: Mirrors of Love & Grief is a poetry collection that stares straight at the kind of loss most of us circle around in euphemisms. Steven Lewis writes in the wake of his grandson Rory’s death, and the book becomes a record of what grief does to time, language, faith, memory, and the body itself. These poems don’t try to “resolve” mourning into something tidy or inspirational. Instead, they track the daily weather of it—shock, numbness, rage, tenderness, flashes of humor, and the occasional, startling moment of lightness that doesn’t erase the dark, but sits beside it.

Spoiler-Free Summary

This collection moves like a series of dispatches from a life split into “before” and “after.” The opening pieces establish a narrator who once relied on composure—his “sea wall”—only to find it splintered by tragedy, forcing him into a new kind of bravery that isn’t heroic so much as unavoidable: keep living, keep speaking, keep loving.

From there, the poems travel through landscapes both literal and internal. Lewis threads place into the grief—New Paltz, Port Royal, Madrid, Granada, the wetlands, the ocean—using physical settings as emotional mirrors. The book repeatedly returns to the problem of language: how words can fail, how platitudes curdle, how the mouth fills with “nothing to say,” and yet how the poem itself becomes the only tool left.

Structurally, the collection alternates between longer narrative-lyric pieces and shorter forms (tanka/haiku-like sequences), giving the reader a rhythm that feels true to mourning: long spirals of memory followed by abrupt, breath-sized truths. There are poems that read like dreams you can’t shake, poems that argue with hope (and with the kind of hope that feels like betrayal), poems that catalogue the trivial distractions of evenings, and poems that find brief mercy in nature—birds, tracks in snow, wind, shoreline, the animal steadiness of the world continuing.

My take on Peering Into Infinity: Mirrors of Love & Grief

Reading Peering Into Infinity: Mirrors of Love & Grief feels like being invited to sit beside someone who’s grieving, not to be “taught” anything, but to simply be there while they try—day after day—to find language that can hold what happened. Right from the opening pages, the book tells you what kind of journey this is: it’s dedicated to Rory (with his dates printed plainly on the page), and it frames grief as something ongoing, lived-in, and intimate rather than neatly resolved.

What I appreciated most is how Steven Lewis refuses the tidy version of mourning. In the introduction (“My Own Private Sea Wall”), he admits to the strange math of emotion—how we can stay dry-eyed for one loss, then break for another—and he uses that “sea wall” image to show the lifelong training so many people internalize: keep it together, don’t crack, don’t wail. The writing is direct, confessional, and rhythmic, and it makes you feel the pressure behind the restraint.

Then the collection starts moving like real life moves: not in a straight line, but in loops—memory, daily routine, sudden triggers, and the constant urge to “go home” to a version of life that no longer exists. One of the strongest sequences, “Daily Dispatches from Across the Border,” turns grief into a kind of bureaucracy you can’t win: you show up, you plead, you’re told no, you’re sent back to the wrong side of your own life. It’s a painful metaphor because it’s also so accurate—grief really can feel like being permanently “deported” from your before.

Even when Lewis travels—Madrid, Granada, beaches, wetlands—the scenery doesn’t work like an escape hatch. Instead, it becomes a mirror that throws the past into sharper focus. The poems keep circling the same truth: love is still present, but it’s now braided with absence. And the way he writes that braid is what makes this collection land. He’s not trying to be pretty about devastation, but he also doesn’t surrender to bleakness for its own sake. The tenderness keeps arriving in flashes: a porch memory, a shared meal, the ordinary sacredness of “before,” and the stubborn fact that the world keeps moving even when you can’t.

Stylistically, a lot of these pieces read like lyrical prose-poems—long lines, breathy momentum, repetition that mimics obsessive thought. Dates and locations at the end of poems make them feel like journal entries from inside the storm. And the book’s use of epigraphs (like The Little Prince) quietly underlines one of its core ideas: that love doesn’t vanish, it changes shape—and sometimes it comes back in the smallest, strangest ways, like laughter catching in your throat when you look up.

This isn’t a collection I’d hand to someone looking for light reading or inspirational “grief lessons.” It’s for readers who can sit with sorrow without demanding a quick meaning, and for anyone who recognizes that mourning can be both raw and repetitive—and still, somehow, threaded through with devotion.

This book is Best for readers who appreciate memoir-like poetry, elegiac collections, and honest grief writing that values truth over comfort.

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