Review: Francesco Levato - Endless, Beautiful, Exact

Endless, Beautiful, Exact
Francesco Levato
Argotist Ebooks, 39 pages

“We were presently devoured, our joy, very great,.” This is the opening line of Francesco Levato’s, Endless, Beautiful, Exact, which sets a high standard for the reading to sustain throughout the collection. But during the reading experience the reader does in fact become “presently devoured” by the “skeletons scattered up and down the fields.” The reader’s interaction with the said “skeletons” takes place in the form of the text responding to the reader versus the reader responding to the text. This is affect is perpetuated through the gaps Levato provides throughout the collection — both in form and read. The poem “Oscillation (i)” provides the reader — right away as it is the second poem in the collection, first of the “Oscillations” series — with these gaps to inform his or her throughout.

 There is the first attraction                      then the space between them,

Across that the urges—

            they collide, they recoil, they oscillate.



There is a change of form, of motion,

but no real loss.



This is not heat, not force, but when they strike it is translation,

conversion to vibration, which is heat,

until their heat becomes radiant. (1-8)

Along with the gaps provided by Levato to guide the reader, he also employs symmetry to hold the collection together. This idea of symmetry is not to mean, “the correspondence in size, form, and arrangement of parts on opposite sides of a plane, line, or point,” but rather I am meaning it to carry a meaning in the same vein as Georg Simmel described, in that; “aesthetically, symmetry means the dependence of the individual element on its interactions with others, and it also denotes the closedness of the relevant circle.” The parts of the collection are working together to form the whole. The three words of the title interacting with the three distinct sections of the collection, the title and the collection’s final poem serving as bookends for the collection, holding it together, keeping it from falling down and the idea of the poems collaged poems lends to the collection being Endless, Beautiful, Exact.

To get the entire effect of the goings on in Francesco Levato’s Endless, Beautiful, Exact, one must not only read, but read again and closer than the first time, because “Paradise is here/… [and] It is seeking resonance[.]”