Turnstone Press

"Jerusalem has inspired some of the greatest writers, poets, and artists for millennia. In her poems about Jerusalem, Di Brandt has not only captured the stature and the magic of this timeless city with its many contradictions, but has articluated so well the pain and suffering of its inhabitants. She saw and heard the 'living stones'."
--Kathy Bergen, Executive Director, ICCP (International Coordinating Committee for Non-governmental Organizations on the Question of Palestine), Geneva

"Di Brandt has re-invented the concept of ecstatic attention so honoured by Denise Levertov, inscribing not only the violence and magic at the storied core of the Holy City, but also her own life-line to the Manitoba heartland. The poet as lover, singing Jerusalem, friends, children, language itself."
- Garry Geddes

"In these poems we hear Di Brandt speaking, with an eloquent unwavering voice, of the heartbreak of human devastation and the exhilaration of unbinding old wounds. This is a wonderful, gently forceful collection—the poems of echoes and incantations, evocatively driven by longing, and linked by a series of delicate narrative threads."
- Hildi Froese Tiessen

"This is a strong and haunting collection—one that demands more than one reading."
-Canadian Book Review Annual

Brandt "continues to articulate her imagined Jerusalem in the face of violence and unrest with lines so evocative the reader can almost smell the Arabic coffee, feel the touch of Bassam, taste the salt of the Dead Sea. She conveys the jewel-like quality of the land and the special magic of the people of Israel despite the hard reality."
-Quill and Quire

"Di Brandt has, with every new book of poetry, moved closer to the heart of lyric and nearer to the edge of language...(the poems) become more and more compelling when they are read in the light of one another. As individual poems, they are beautiful, precise, nearly flawless; as a collection they are even more than that."
- Prairie Fire Review of Books

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