#Review: Peering Into Infinity by Steven Lewis

Book Review: Peering Into Infinity: Mirrors of Love & Grief
Author: Steven Lewis
Rating = 4.5/5

Peering Into Infinity: Mirrors of Love & Grief is not a collection one reads quickly or casually. It asks for pauses, for silences between lines, for moments where you close the book and simply sit with what has been said—and what cannot be said. Steven Lewis writes from a place where grief has stripped language of its politeness. What remains is bare, unguarded, and devastatingly sincere. These poems do not explain loss; they inhabit it.

At the heart of the collection is the loss of a beloved grandson, but the poems never shrink into private mourning alone. Instead, they widen into wetlands, trains, kitchens, beaches, and memory itself. Lewis returns again and again to the failure of words, and paradoxically, it is this admission of linguistic inadequacy that gives the poems their power. In pieces like Two Words and A Passing Lightness of Being, grief resists metaphor even as metaphor becomes the only way to breathe around it. Love and loss reflect each other endlessly, like mirrors facing mirrors, refusing closure.

There is a quiet courage in how Lewis allows contradiction to stand. Faith and doubt coexist. Anger and tenderness share the same line. The poems move between the ordinary and the cosmic, reminding us that grief lives as much in grocery lists and television evenings as it does in oceans and stars. The dead are not romanticized; they are remembered in touch, habit, and absence.

Grief does not knock.
It moves in,
learns the house,
sits where love once sat
and refuses to leave.

An additional strength of this collection lies in its attentiveness to time. Lewis understands that grief does not move forward neatly—it loops, stalls, revisits, and ambushes. The poems resist the cultural pressure to “heal” or “move on.” Instead, they honour endurance. Reading this book feels like being trusted with something fragile. There is no performance here, only presence.

Ultimately, Peering Into Infinity offers companionship rather than comfort. It tells the reader: this is survivable, not because it ends, but because love continues to speak—sometimes in words, sometimes in silence.

Find this book here.