Notes towards poems 5786

FB July 24

I want to have
my body witnessed
by a notary
in a baby doll nighty

FB July 22

thinking about the vastness
of the cosmos
I step in dog poo

______

בגלל שפחדתי
מהפחד
הלכתי לקרבי

__________

the natural beauty

of the bottle shop

FB July 19

metaphors taken literally:

its eating me up inside ( cookie monster? tapeworm?)

I feel like a million dollars ( ah so money can feel)

he treats me like a door mat ( rubber, coir? do you sleep outside front door)

She let me down ( rope? knotted sheets? Rapunzel?)

I'm just hanging on by the skin of my teeth ( OMG hope it doesn't get stretch marks)

He's always fishing for compliiments ( and here was I thinking he is vegan)

I feel like they are just playing with me (soccer? cricket? charades?)

You look like you about to explode ( please don't...unless you're a suicide bomber, in which case do it far away from me and your intended victims )

______

in many ways psychologists

are like sex workers

both equally

noble professions

they charge by the hour

see parts of people

that others do not

they provide a facsimile

of intimacy

which is, but isn't

and must by necessity

come close while keeping

some distance

FB Jul 17

Like Macbeth

call it fatalism

call it despair

once I've started the burger

I finish it

FB July 16

Does no one love you?

Then why does the sun not withhold its light

and the trees still offer their shade?

FB July 9

Looking for an experienced therapist ( for myself) skilled in working with complex ongoing trauma caused by administrivia

FB July 2

In winter

tiny cockroaches

can live on dust

and moonbeams

but in summer

as they grow

they are impelled

to venture forth in search

of bigger prey

FB July 1

my red blood cell count is

low

the birds are singing

a vital young woman walks by

I turn to drink in

the promise of her body hoping to get an infusion from her

FB June 29

Even desires

- a narrow constricted distant echo of the infinite -

are love in disguise

FB 12 May

sad medium
angry medium
happy medium!

FB 11 May

I wish I could chat up women

silently

wordlessly

telepathically

without long

courtship rituals

the neither of us really believe in

but, not worried about what comes after,

just nod to each other

and poof! find ourselves

waking up in a bedroom

entwined

_______

May 10

psychic large?
psychic small?
psychic medium!

____________

May 6

clover moore:

trendy terrorism

designer bombings

mangled lives and

bodies of teenagers

at the Dolphinarium,

and pensioners

at the Park Hotel

painted over

with nail polish

_____________

the more dangerous

the world seems to become

the more I seek safety

in dreams of nipples

and what lies

in the interstitial

of female

thighs

_____________

May 5

Black olives on the path

what had to be picked

with hard labour

a few months prior

is now given freely

May 2

ripples on a still pond:
desire

April 30

Get your shit together

to be a Jew

is to have

lots of other people

project their shit

onto you

The Jewish year 5786 runs from sunset on September 22, 2025, to sunset on September 11, 2026. In Jewish tradition, it is considered a year of divine connection, symbolized by the Hebrew letter vav (ו), representing a hook, bridge, or connection between heaven and earth, often referred to as a year to "stretch to connect" or build unity.Key Significance of 5786:Hebrew Letter Vav (ו): The year is associated with the 6th letter, vav, which acts as a connector and represents humanity (created on the 6th day).Theme of Connection: It is viewed as a time for divine alignment, bringing together disjointed seasons, and connecting the spiritual and physical realms - and hopefully in my case, the inner and the outer.

I watch the mind, its machinations, its impossible hunger for safety and comfort, its fears and desires. That is what mind does.

April 21 St

there will never be a better moment

than now

there will never be a better tree

than this tree

there will never be a better pain

than this pain

there will never be a better acceptance

than this acceptance

there will never be a better moment

than now

April 20

a cloud of grief

settled on the children of Sinai

and the sky was so dark

you could see stars in the daytime

April 17

A MESSAGE FROM THE ROAD SAFETY COUNCIL

Beware of blind spots

beware of sighted spots

beware of excited spots

beware of deaf spots

beware of black spots

beware of white spots

beware of (recently) spotted

spots

in general exercise due caution

when approaching spots

April 15

Process poems

worrying about dying?

a sure sign

you're still alive 

*

whenever there is an emotional issue in my life

and I feel a bit disconnected

the numbness in my left foot increases

because everything is connected

*

I watch the talk on sex addiction

because I find the presenter

very sexy

April 13

A heavy burden

The Bondi massacre must never be forgotten"

"The October 7 massacre must never be forgotten"

"The Shoah must never be forgotten"

"The Chmielnicki massacres must never be forgotten"

"The expulsion from Spain must never be forgotten"

"The destruction of Jerusalem and the Temples must never be forgotten"

"The Exodus must never be forgotten"

"Shabbat must never be forgotten"

O my sweet people

with all these things to remember

when will you find time

to live?

April 8 26

I watch the talk on objectification

because the presenter has big breasts

April 5

Its the Easter/Passover long weekend, so police are out in force, and random breath testing can happen anytime, anywhere. Bad breath can attract spot fines of up to $250, and gingivitis up to $300. So brush your teeth people!

April 2

you can never

outrun loneliness

so embrace 

surrender

and go home

April 1

Pesach

tribal

tidal

pulling me

like the moon

March 31

urban loneliness

rural loneliness

single loneliness

partnered loneliness

lonely loneliness

implausible loneliness

One

without a second

__________

March 29

"don't hide your light behind
a bushel...
but if bustin
you may pee there"

______

singles night

8 lonely people
together

_______

March 27

"say something true"
"I can't"
"yes you can"
"am"

March 26

the worm in Blake's poem:
the thought "something is wrong"

March 25

the body as a fear battery
waiting to discharge

March 24

There are different kinds of silence

quiet silence

loud silence

silence that screams

louder than noise March 19

Alibis people produce at choir practice in response to internal prosecutor:

March 18

self doubt
is part of the journey

March 15 2026

she sobbed
and the waves sobbed with her

TIME OUT - then 2026 continues below these two

FB MAY 15 2023

Gender Differences??

I place my sperm

inside her

tens of thousands of them

she places her words

inside me

tens of thousands of them

FB December 8 2021

My young adult son

keeps his distance

but feeds me the occasional

morsel

major victories and defeats

but nothing in between

like a dog gone for weeks

that only comes indoors

to bring a magnificent rat

to place at my feet

or, cowed, tail folded

rests a while between them.

and when he does

despite the bitter thoughts

that seemed to calcify

in the long bleak silences

amazingly

the best father I know how

appears with

open arms

and heart

____________

March 12 2026

even when a woman is scowling
at you
her breasts may still be smiling

In what year

was the anti oxidant party founded

March 10

DENTIST FOR WEALTHY PEOPLE

designer anaesthetics

platinum tipped drills

gold filligree floss

Becoming The Sea

 

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

Copies can currently be ordered from the Sydney Jewish Museum. Some proceeds from the sale go to the museum.

https://shop.sydneyjewishmuseum.com.au/products/becoming-the-sea-immanuel-suttner

_______________

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

https://shop.sydneyjewishmuseum.com.au/products/hidden-and-revealed-immanuel-suttner

https://shop.sydneyjewishmuseum.com.au/products/ripening-immanuel-suttner

Suttner's children's book The African Animal Football Cup, which costs AUD $25, can be ordered directly from the author. DM him via the FB page with that name.

Important to sample the wares before purchasing. For two poems fom each collection please see here.

And more of Suttner's poems featured on
https://judithmagazine.substack.com/p/ritual-emersion

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 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.  

More poems can be read at https://judithmagazine.substack.com/p/ritual-emersion

_____________________

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.