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...

How to speak of the imaginative reach of a land habitually seen as a seedbed of faiths and heresies, confluences and ruptures . . . trouble spot and findspot, ruin and renewal, fault line and ragged clime, with a medley of people and languages once known with mingled affection and wariness as Levantine? So begins poet Gabriel Levin in his journeys in the Levant, the exotic land that stands at the crossroads of western Asia, the eastern Mediterranean, and northeast Africa. Part travelogue, part field guide, and part literary appreciation, "The Dune s Twisted Edge" assembles six interlinked...

"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...

Errant is Israeli poet Gabriel Levin's sixth collection. It is a book of riddles by an imagination whose fate is that of the wanderer who keeps waking up and watching the dream vanish just before he can quite grasp it.