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.
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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)
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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.
