With Jerusalem as its epicentre, Gabriel Levin’s first collection since Ostraca (1999) extends his quarter-century long ramble through the Levant – his adopted homeland. On a Greek island, in the desert wastes of southern Jordan’s Wadi Rumm, and in Malta (with its Stone Age temples serving as a backdrop to the long polyphonic title poem), The Maltese Dreambook abounds in unforeseen encounters that blur the borders between the phantasmal
and the real. The modern and the archaic, the rational and the imaginary, ink and blood, self and other – the collection includes a rendition of a desert ode by the magnificent pre-Islamic poet Imru al-Qays – all are held in charged and provocative tension in poems that “quicken the soul … into a song of all our vanishings.”

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 and several translations from Hebrew, French and Arabic. He is a founding editor of Ibis Editions, a small press established in Jerusalem dedicated to the publication, in English, of literature from the Levant.

“Ostraca rakes through archaeological sites of the Mediterranean, and is astounding. Constantine Cavafy might have been proud of some of these poems.” — Tom Payne, Daily Telegraph

"Malta emerges as a place of refuge, of a distinctive and creative suggestiveness; a space in which the cultures and idioms of the Eastern Mediterranean cross and meet." - Steven Matthews, Poetry Review