"Part travelogue, part literary criticism, this book brings together six interlinked essays that probe the physical, cultural, and imaginative geography of the eastern seaboard of the Levant and its deserts. Its essay evolves out of the author's own travels through a certain region: the Judean desert extending to the Dead Sea, Wadi Rumm south of Petra, the Negev of modern-day Israel, the Galilee, the Arabian desert in which the great pre-Islamic poets once roamed. When the author is not encountering other presences, such as the Bedouin and writers from the distant and near past, he finds himself stumbling over the physical traces of vanished civilizations."--publisher.

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.

Gabriel Levin's fourth collection moves from the Mediterranean world that has engaged his imagination for the last thirty years, to the sombre title sequence written in the shadow of Israel's bombardment and incursion into Gaza in 2008. These striking poems and their prose commentary ( The Fathers are Watching ) navigate between the depredations of war and the mind's need to disengage itself from its surroundings. The final section of this articulate and compassionate book is a fifteen-sonnet cycle dispatched from the shores of an unnamed island, which could be everyman's abode, in search of what might lie yonder.

Gabriel Levin's second collection builds confidently on his highly praised first. In graceful, exacting lyrics, he addresses subjects wrested from a stark, natural world of fire and ash' desert tints, and its diverse, vital heritage, with a rare sensitivity to the life of things past as well as present. In Ostraca his journey through the Mediterranean and the Levant is attuned to a wide mix of voices (among them, the lone voice of a sentry, pieced together from five potsherds or ostraca') and a range of times and places, from the Sahara, Cyprus, Byzantine Mt Athos and war-torn Lebanon to his refractory, adopted Jerusalem, and an emerging Palestine. Gabriel Levin, born in France in 1948, grew up in the United States and Israel. His first collection of poems, Sleepers of Beulah, was published in 1992. His poems, essays and translations from Hebrew have appeared in literary magazines in England and the United States.

Errant , Gabriel Levin's sixth collection, opens and ends with invocations: of Venus at dawn and Hesperus at dusk. The book's day takes us on a three-part planetary journey. "What Drew Me On" is inspired by Tamara Rikman's free-floating works on paper and by Plato's image of the music of the spheres. Ghostly presences are evoked in several poetic forms, including terza rima for the poet's take on image-making down the ages. "First came sooty beings shinnying up walls." There are elegies to the cineastes Abbas Kiarostami and Chantal Akerman, as well as translations from Greek and (in villanelle form) from the Medieval Hebrew of Avraham Ibn Ezra. There are aubades, lyrics, and a sequence arranged in short-lined triads of psychic retreat in Jerusalem. The wanderer picks up where he left off in earlier books, striking out from home, conjuring Sa'adi's Gulistan or Nasir-i Khursaw in Cairo; pocketing bits of obsidian on the island of Melos, paying homage to Yannis Ritsos in Crete.

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.