Ostraca

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.