The third poetry collection of iconoclastic poet Immanuel Suttner, poet, mystic, wit, and master of the sacred everyday.
Suttner's work has been described as contemporary zen with charoset, served on a bed of "rye" humour; devotional poems disguised as complaints to G-d, mixed with confessional outpourings, meditative contemplations on grief, sexuality and being, ironic salvos at the idiocies of consumerism, and love poems to his late dog Ella.
Suttner is deeply pulled towards the understandings of non-dualism, which in Hindu tradition is referred to as advaita vedanta, and in the West is spoken for by people like Byron Katie, Eckhart Tolle and Rupert Spira. He finds these same realisations in classical Jewish sources, where they are either overt, or, more frequently, somewhat hidden, but available to be gently prised out into the open.
As in the commentaries of the Talmud, where a 17th century commentator in Poland may dialogue with an 11th century commentator in France, and time and space are no impediment to their conversation, so Suttner dialogues with voices from many places, times and traditions; from Walt Whitman to Rumi, from Israeli poets Yehuda Amichai and Natan Alterman to artifacts of popular culture such as the Blues Brothers or Shuffle dancing, from Kahlil Gibran to Alan Ginsberg, from the psalmist to Indian gurus.
But Suttner's poetry is rarely cerebral or high brow. His strongest and most moving poetry is about the everyday, and the beings and things we love the most, partners and parents, children and dear friends, companion animals and mentors, the ones we have lost, or even the familiar objects with which we comfort ourselves.
At its core of his poetry is the mystery of being, the experience of emotion, and attempts to capture moments of deep gratitude and awe, and to somehow evoke what lies at the heart of them.
Immanuel Suttner's poetry is simple, accessible, intimate, its voice colloquial, its subject matter as varied as the poet's life on three continents, but for want of better approximations might be characterised as shifting between the confessional, the polemical and the devotional. Suttner grew up in South Africa. lived in Israel for a decade, and currently lives in Australia. He has a Masters in Counselling, and a degree in English and Hebrew literature from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has authored scripts for television, non-fiction books, a fiction children's book, and short stories. His influences include ancient Hebrew texts, Rumi, the likes of Robert Frost, Yehuda Amichai, Natan Alterman, Alan Ginsburg, and devotional and liturgical poetry. His work is regularly published in journals in the USA, India, Israel, South Africa and Australia.
