With Jerusalem as its epicentre, The Maltese Dreambook extends Gabriel Levin’s quarter-century-long ramble through the Levant, his adopted homeland. On a Greek island, in the desert wastes of southern Jordan and in Malta, whose Stone Age temples serve as a backdrop to the title poem, this collection abounds in unforeseen encounters that blur the borders between the phantasmal and the real, the modern and the archaic, the rational and the imaginary. Gabriel Levin was born in France, grew up in the United States, and has been living in Jerusalem since 1972. He has published two collections of poetry, Sleepers of Beulah (1992) and Ostraca (1999) and several translations from the Hebrew, French and Arabic, including a selection of Yehuda Halevi’s poetry, Poems from the Diwan (Anvil, 2002). He is one of the founding editors of Ibis Editions, a small press established in Jerusalem in 1997 and dedicated to the publication, in English, of literature from the Levant.

Coming Forth by Day breaks new ground in its formal experimentation as well as in its exploration of remote corners of the Mediterranean. The long title poem is written from the multiple perspectives of the personages in Courbet's large painting The Artist's Studio . Courbet's realism blends with ancient Eastern mythologies, including the Egyptian Book of the Dead , which gives the collection its title. In another long poem, "Balthazar's Field," the poet walks the length and breadth of Patmos, seeking out the hidden and the heterogeneous: the cave of St. John, a Greek priestess's inscription carved on a stone. The book concludes with an extended meditation on modern music written in homage to the composer Alexander Goehr.