Wednesday, July 9, 2025

Becoming The Sea

 

Immanuel Suttner's latest collection of poetry - Becoming the Sea  -  was launched on 6 July 2025
(10th Tamuz 5785) 

Copies can be ordered directly from the author. 

Email your order to manosuttner@gmail.com and make payment by PayPal using same email address. 

Each book cost $15.00 AUD (Australian Dollars).

Suttner's two previous collections - Hidden & Revealed (2007) and Ripening (2020) can be ordered in similar fashion. 

Each book weighs aproximately 190 grams, so if you ordered two books 

postage to the USA and Canada would be AUD $29, i.e $59 in total
and to the UK it would be $34, ie. $64 in total 

If you ordered four books postage to the USA and Canada would be $42, i.e $102 in total
and to the UK it would be $48, i.e. $108 in total.

Postage anywhere in Australia, for up to 5 books, would not exceed $20 postage, plus the cost of the books themselves.  

Scroll down to bottom to see detailed table of postal charges

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Suttner grew up in South Africa. He moved to Israel shortly before his eighteenth birthday, and lived and studied there for a decade, along the way doing a degree in English and Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. These years exposed him to a broad array of English and Hebrew source texts,which he frequently alludes to, plays with or subverts in his poetry. 

Suttner returned to South Africa 1n 1991, and in 2008 moved to Australia. He is grateful to call this ancient land, with its songlines and bustling cities, its immigrants from many lands, its unique flaura and fauna, home. He works as a counsellor and writes poetry. In his spare time he enjoys gardening, singing and gentle exercise such as chi gong.


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, all mixed in with a smattering of confessional outpourings, ironic salvos at the idiocies of consumerism, and love poems to his late dog Ella. 

Suttner has authored several books including Cutting Through the Mountain (1997, Viking), The African Animal Football Cup (2010, won the inaugural fiction prize, local writers word festival, Woollahra Council ), non-fiction books for children, and four collections of poetry: Hidden and Revealed (2007), Ripening (2020), Becoming The Sea (2025) and the forthcoming Glimmers (2025). His poems have been published in journals around the world, and anthologized in collections, as have several of his short stories.


Among his other claims to fame are being one of the voices of Big Brother in South Africa; writing film scripts and tv series that never got made, and having a strong affinity for, and with, plants and animals of every description from the humble cockroach through to the mighty mouse. 


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, time and space being 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 Amicha and Natan Alterman to artifacts of popular culture such as the Blues Brothers or Shuffle dancing, from Kahil 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 experience of emotion, attempts to capture moments of deep feeling, and to somehow touch what lies at the heart of them.  

_____________________

Reviews of "Becoming the Sea"


"Immanuel Suttner is a poetic mystic who reveals the profundity of the everyday. With a poignant mastery of the written word, Suttner crafts poems that reflect the connections and common core of our humanity." (Darren Stein, author of The Nut House Poems  and Stop All the Clocks )


Immanuel Suttner's poems are quirky and witty, full of reversals and dark irony. He describes himself, in a memorable line, as 'a knower of things I can't see' - and in 

Becoming the Sea, he invites us to share his vision of those unseen yet powerful undercurrents of meaning. (Prof. David Medalie, director of unit for creative writing, University of Pretoria, award-winning writer of The Shooting of the Christmas Cows 

and The Mistress's Dog)


Instructions for living from the dog: 

leave no smell unsmelt, no friend unlicked” 

Reading Immanuel Suttner is “pure liquid knowing”  akin to discovering that corn can pop. (Wayne-Daniel Berard, PhD, author of Poetry Mage and The Last Essene.)


Immanuel Suttner has the keen poet's eye for the small details of life that reveal profound truths. (Professor Barry Spurr, Literary Editor, Quadrant)

_____________


What critics said about “Ripening” (2020)

'Ripening' presents Suttner as master craftsman who has skilled himself in the metier of turning biography into art. As a poet he believes that poetry lies all around in the trivialities of life and what is required is simply a poetic ear and an imaginative eye. As Amitav Ghosh wrote of Agha Shahid Ali, "he has a sorcerer's ability to transmute the mundane into magical".

(Moizur Rehman Khan, Co-Editor, Prosopisia Literary Journal)


One piece in this collection speaks of keeping “one eye looking out and two eyes looking in.” That just about sums up these poems; the outer world is never lost while the inner is always doubly found. .... Ripening sings!

(Wayne-Daniel Berard, Editor, Windfall, a journal of spiritual poetry.)


I have always admired Immanuel’s writing. But nothing prepared me for the delights of his new collection, 'Ripening': the richness and wryness of the word play, the deeply poignant (yet never sentimental) play of emotions. The collection is aptly titled: Suttner's craft has ripened into maturity.

(Prof. David Medalie, Director of the Unit for Creative Writing at the University of Pretoria.)


Immanuel Suttner's poems overflow with humanity and feeling. But more than that — intimations of the metaphysical, history and identity, a sense of irony, playfulness. Reading them, I feel I am peering into the poet’s soul, and occasionally, tears well in my eyes.

(Mitchell James Kaplan, award winning author of novels By Fire, By Water, and The Unbounded Night.)



What critics have said about "Hidden & Revealed" (2007):


"These are wonderful poems, at times refreshingly cynical, always deeply gripping." Dr Ute Ben Yosef, Jacob Gitlin Library



"Immanuel Suttner's poetry is beautiful and extraordinarily and unexpectedly moving. It is also witty and what some would call 'spiritual'. But what moves me most is this: Some poetry misleads readers because it seems so simple. Readers should be cautioned. This kind of poetry is 'simple'. But it is not the simplicity of shallowness: it is the lucidity of a very deep pool. "

Jeremy Gordin, Sunday Independent



"Suttner's imagery returns repeatedly to the artefacts of faith lost - and faith found....and assumes a poignancy reminiscent of Amichai" Gwen Podbrey, Jewish Report



"In his poetry, Immanuel Suttner has a gift for communicating paradox, often through poems that are disarmingly simple, but always with a sting in the punchline. "Punchline" here is apt, for Suttner likens some of what he writes to a good joke, saying that when the poetry works, it has a climax that is fresh and surprising - but also familiar, almost intimate, able to worm its way under one's skin." (Victor Dlamini, Book SA) http://victordlamini.book.co.za/blog/2008/01/07/podcast-the-disarming-irony-of-poet-immanuel-suttner/



"Immanuel Suttner puts me in mind of Billy Collins, a poet of apparently haphazard and informal speech. Collins is perhaps one of the most enjoyable, and enjoyed, poets writing in the world today, for the reason that he is both modest and accessible. Suttner, too, is of this poetic ilk. Still, under the flippancy and lightness of tone there is something profound and dark.The strongest poems in his volume Hidden and Revealed (Snailpress/QuartzPress), such as Ma (Carpe diem, 15th September 1953) and Jerusalem, offer moments of humour and levity, but the weight of the poems rests in their crevices; the darkness spoken and the even darker unsaid. Jerusalem is one of the finest poems I've read in a long time. Suttner, a Jew, speaks to me, a Muslim, about beauty, atrocity and ambivalence in a way that bridges gaps, despite our differing political affiliations: The book is a joy to read (though Suttner's and my politics differ, an overriding sense of compassion is what I have retained from my readings of the volume) and the poems are fresh, vital, wholly without dullness and pedantry, as one can expect from books produced by publisher Gus Ferguson.Fiona Zerbst, Sunday Independent, http://www.sundayindependent.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=4294356

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Here are the postage fees (again in Australian Dollars) to the USA, Canada and the UK. 

Click on image to enlarge. 

 

Monday, October 28, 2024

Gabriel did his undergraduate degree in anthropology and economics in Argentina.  When he finished he felt unsettled, and decided to travel before entering the world of work. He ended up backpacking in the south of India, and ended up in Kerala. As these things happen he met a documentary maker there, who was making a documentary about the Indian Jews of Cochin. The filmaker and Gabriel hit it off, and Gabriel got involved with the production, in a volunteer capacity,drawing upon his anthropology background, and learning about filmaking. 

The filmaker told Gabriel he would be travelling to Israel, where most of the Cochin community had emigrated. Gabriel called his parents, who said they would fund a ticket to Israel, happy their son was travelling to the Jewish homeland and secretly hoping he might meet a suitable partner there.

Although he did not meet a partner there, Gabriel fell in love with Israel. He decided to enroll for a Masters in "Documentary Story telling" ast a little film school in tel Aviv. There was a girlfriend or two, but nothing lasted longer than six months. While a student, partly because the idea titillated him, and partly because he was paid for it, which helped fill out his meagre student allowance, he donated sperm to a fertility clinic adjacent to the Soroka hospital in Tel Aviv. After six months of regular visits to the clinic they told him his services were no longer required, as some couples had conceived from the donations and there was a limit to how much each donor contributed.  

When Gabriel completed his degree he looked for work. After applying unsuccessfully for countless jobs he found a role at the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive cataloging material, but it was a bit of a nowhere job. He had a 3 month fling with a woman he met at an energy healing workshop, but after three months it fizzled out by mutual agreement.

Gabriel, believing he was treading water,  decided to return to the land of his birth, Argentina, for a holiday, and spend some time closer to his parents and a sibling who had married. As happens, his life unfolded as life does. He began working as a research assistant for a production company, and looked for opportunities to make documentaries where his interest in anthropology and film making coalesced. He had two relationships, the second of which turned into marriage, a son and a daughter, a house with a mortgage, some successes and struggles with work, and the ups and downs of life.

The family travelled, the children grew bigger, the marriage was good, but gradually little cracks appeared and the couple slowly drifted apart. By the time both children were attending university the shared life tasks that had been the last remaining glue had dissolved, and Gabriel and his wife decided upon an amicable separation. Gabriel found himself living alone in a two bedroom apartment in Buenos Aires, seeing his children only now and then. They were well adjusted kids, leading increasingly busy lives of their own, and did not have much time or interest in anything but perfunctory contacts. 

There had been a number of terror attacks on Israelis in the last few months, one in the suburb where Gabriel had lived as a student some 30 years ago. He was lonely. The connections which had anchored him to Buenos Aires had somehow evaporated. The impulse arose in him, suddenly, unbidden, to revist the country where he had spent happy years as a relatively carefree student, and after some deliberation he arranged his life so he could spend three months in Israel, 6 weeks volunteering with an organisation that supported orphans whose families had been killed in bombings and shootings, the rest of the time free to travel and look up old acquaintences.

One of the Israeli staff at the organisation was a young woman in her late 20s, a social work student who was doing her placenment at the organisation. Gabriel felt strongly attracted to her, her youth and vitality and kindness. He tried to find excuses to invite her for coffee, ostensibly to discuss organisational matters, but really just so he could spend time with her. She told him about her conflicts  and aspirations, that she was recovering from the breakup of a seven year relationship, and what she hoped to do with her degree when she finished. Gavriel listened, made suggestions, admitted he was attracted to her. She came back to the Air B & B he was renting one night. They kissed. then kissed again.  

"You don't mind that I'm old enough to be your father"
"Give me another drag of that joint and I won't mind"

They slept together

She said it was probably a mistake, but they slept together again. He told her he did not have much to go back to Argentina too, and would commit to her if she did not want to look for a more appropriate age mate. He also offered to take her back to Argentina. She ended the relationship. He finished the six weeks, still besotted with her, but travelled north to help pick fruit on a moshav whose labourers had fled ongoing missiles from Lebanon. After a month in the North he received a phone call.

"I'm pregnant" she said, " I'm taking it as a sign. I've decided to keep the baby. I'm sure he or she will look a lot like us." 

"We should get some genetic testing" he told her. For "Tae Sachs syndrome, and the other Ashkenazi stuff."

They did the tests. It turned out she was his daughter.



Wednesday, August 21, 2024

How may I be of excellent service to you today?

 Scene in a restaurant:

Customer: waiter....waiter.
His friend: what do you want?
Customer: I just want them to bring us some water while we're waiting. Waiter. WAITER.
(eventually his gesticulating catches the attention of a waiter who comes over)
Waiter: what can I get you?
Customer: we've already ordered, but it seems to be taking a long time. can we get some water for the table please?
Waiter: Of course. would you like iced water or room temperature?
Customer: room temperature is fine.
Waiter. Room temperature it is. Two glasses or would you like me to bring a jug as well?
Customer: A jug would be good, especially if you're going to keep us waiting a long time for our food.
Waiter: (laboriously making notes on phone) jug....two glasses....room temperature...right. Would you like that water fizzy or plain?
Customer: is there an additional charge for fizzy?
Waiter: No sir, it's all on the house
Customer. Fizzy then. Can you bring it now...am starting to get thirsty from all these qiuestions.
Waiter: Certainly. Would you like your bubbles to be carbon dioxide or nitrous oxide? We have a machine that can do either...
Customer: However it comes. just bring some water.
Waiter: Would you like your water served in glasses or in this new line of biodgradable cups we're trying out?
Customer: I don't care!
Waiter: Please choose an option.
Customer. Glasses!
Waiter (laboriously records notes on phone). I'll be back very soon with your water.
Waiiter goes. Customer [plays angrily with his cutlery, waiting for the food, or the water, to appear. Eventually it does. Waiter puts down a jug of sparkling water with a slice of lemon in itm, and two cut crystal glasses.
Customer: At last.
The waiter hovers nearby as customer 2 pours customer 1 a glass of water, and then one for himself. they both drink.
Waiter: (stepping back close to the table) how is your water gentleman?
Customer 2; Its fine. its water.
Waiter: temperature ok?
Customer 1: yes, can you go and see where our order is
Waiter: certainly but may I ( he removes a tablet from a pocket in his apron) ask you just to give us some feedback and do a very quick customer satisfaction survey regarding your water experience with us?
Customer 1: No, I don't want to do any surveys. I came here to eat, not to look at screens. And I haven't had a "water experience'. i asked for water. you brought it. I've had a few sips and hope to have more while you find out where the food we ordered 30 minutes ago is.
Waiter: I'm sorry sir, I can't proceed to the next course until you take the survey. Its just one of the little ways we strive to improve our service and enhance customer satisfaction.
Customer 1: but you are creating a very dissatisfied customer here, that's my feedback!
Waiter: I'm sorry its restaurant policy, i don't make the rules. It's only take a minute (thrusts tablet at customer 1, customer 2 takes it)
Customer 2: I'll do it, just so we can get our food and get out of here. (He scrolls through, touching screen to answer multiple questions and give star ratings for multiple metriics regarding their 'water experience. Finishes, hands back to waiter.) There
Waiter: (takes tablet, looks at it, scrolls down) Do you mind me asking, sir, why you've only rated us 1 for service?
Customer 1 This is ridiculous, call the manager.
Waiter: i can do that for you, but first you need to fill in a complaint form ( scrolls and gestures on tablet), I'll just get it up for you... oh, sorry I have to get it off our intranet and I don't have the password on this one, I'll be back soon.
The waiter disappears.
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Invisible Eyes

 Invisibilise


To a one sided academic


invisibilise decades of trauma
plo massacres of school children
Israeli athletes castrated
by Black September murderers at Munich

invisibilise the psychic wounds
a synecdochal sample, one of many:  1979
samir kuntar crosses border,  murders Danny Haran, then smashes the skull of Danny’s 4 year old daughter Einat Haran, her baby  sister Yael Haran suffocates to death while the terrified mother tries to keep her from crying and revealing their hiding place.
upshot? upon release from Israeli prison, in prisoner exchange, kuntar awarded Syria's highest medal and honoured by Iranian President mahmoud ahmadinejad,

invisibilise the successful
torpedoing of the Oslo peace accords by
wave after wave
of hamas suicide bombings
blowing up teenagers at a
discotheque
leaving dancers armless and legless
or pensioners at a pesach seder,
hands trembling a little
as they navigate
spoon to mouth and then trembling no more
bits of flesh in the chandeliers

invisibilise
twisted buses, twisted bus stops
charred bodies, only dna
able to establish who they were
as they headed to market
to buy tomatoes and cucumbers

invisibilise the stabbings
teenagers taken to caves
their hands bound, bodies punctured
with knife wounds

invisibilise
bombs backed with rusty nails
and bolts to tear flesh apart

invisibilise 19 year old
Ori Ansbacher
raped and murdered while walking home
later the grove planted in her memory destroyed by Palestinian vandals.

invisibilise the psychological torture, the television threats
"we'll destroy you just as you were destroyed 80  years ago",
invisibilise the relentless cyber attacks
the gross caricatures, the demonisation, the dehumanisation

invisibilise the
pile on in western “progressive” democracies
by trade unions, professional associations, teachers, academics, artists, journalists, all suddenly and myopically focussed on their shadow aspects of self projected onto Israel. Safe. Easy. Convenient. How many Israel-lovers you gonna rub shoulders with at work or in your university or union or book club?

invisibilise the ecocide
the daily missiles from Gaza and Lebanon, thousands of them
setting pine forests, planted for the love of Zion, ablaze and driving
terrified jackals and hedgehogs and lizards who manage to escape the flames towards the illusion of safety
the fruit
rotting on the trees
farmers unable to attend to their crops

the ballistic missiles fired from Iran and Yemen
the size of buses, designed to maim and murder and terrify
stopped only by Israel’s commitment to protect its citizens

and by Arab ‘allies’,  who vilify Israel in public but quietly co-operate with it, recognising Islamists, not Israel, is the threat

  
invisibilise  the raped and then murdered 

On October 7 2023


the kidnapped,
a red haired baby and toddler bother, whole family
snatched out of their home
whereabouts unknown. 


Judih Weinstein Haggai, seventy years old,
English teacher, poet, peace activist who worked with children with special needs. Who used meditation and mindfulness techniques to treat children suffering from anxiety caused by years of rocket fire from Gaza that have plagued residents of the Gaza border area. murdered with her 72 year old husband Gadi Haggai on October 7,
along with Thai workers, Nepali students, Beduin, Russian, French, US, UK, Ukrainian  nationals, 

invisibilise
the high on Captagon crazed Islamists
shoving machine gun barrels up the bloody vaginas
of the women they've just gang raped
or towing dissidents roped behind motorbikes
around the streets of gaza
throwing homosexuals and political rivals off
rooftops, enforcing a terrible homogenity and
preaching mediaeval blood libels
and then
weave some kind of fairy tale that this
regressive barbarism
equals
"the resistance"

invisibilise the war in Sudan
8.5 million on brink of starvation
and Yemen, Xianjing, Tibet, Myanmar, Ukraine, Syria, gender apartheid in Iran, Afghanistan
no poems for them
no self righteous indignation
no resolutions in local councils, no condemnation at the UN
no marches in the street


close one eye
so you only see gaza
not the other side of the border
so you don't see the North of Israel
depopulated by more missiles than the blitz
150 000 more
pointing at you


or the corpses of murdered hamas captives

left to rot in Gaza, held as trading cards

and to psychologically torture their grieving families 
so that they cannot get closure


close one eye
so you only see the Al Jazeera curated and carefully edited snippet
not the before or after

close both eyes
so you don't see yourself
staring back at you in the mirror
preaching and sanctimoniously stealing
your cheap and easy rectitude

one thing I know for sure
if you sat where Israelis sat
compacent smug fucker
you'd be doing a whole lot
worse than them


___________