Gabriel Levin’s second collection builds confidently on his highly praised first. In graceful, exacting lyrics, he addresses subjects wrested from a stark, natural world of ‘fire and ash’ desert tints, and its diverse, vital heritage, with a rare sensitivity to the life of things past as well as present. In Ostraca his journey through the Mediterranean and the Levant is attuned to a wide mix of voices (among them, the lone voice of a sentry, pieced together from five potsherds or ‘ostraca’) and a range of times and places, from the Sahara, Cyprus, Byzantine Mount Athos and war-torn Lebanon to his refractory, adopted Jerusalem, and an emerging Palestine.