This volume is the first UK publication by Peter Cole, an acclaimed American-Israeli poet and translator. The book reprints the entire contents of his two US collections, Rift (1989) and Hymns & Qualms (1998) under one set of covers and enables a new readership to get to know a remarkable and most original voice. As US poet Forrest Gander observed: "The keenness of his mind and the moral seriousness of his work astonish .... the exquisite specificity of his diction and the intricacy of his prosody are without parallel among the poets of his - and my - generation".

Peter Cole is an an American-born poet and translator, and a long-term resident of Jerusalem. He is also one of the founders and editors of Ibis Editions, a small press devoted to the dissemination of medieval and modern literature of the Middle East, originally composed in Hebrew, Arabic, French, Turkish and Greek. Cole is the author of two volumes of poetry, Rift and Hymns & Qualms, both of which are collected in his Shearsman volume.His prize-winning translations of the Hebrew Golden Age poets Shmuel HaNagid and Solomon Ibn Gabirol, among others, have helped to recreate the world of medieval Spain, in which Jewish artistic and intellectual communities flourished under Islamic rule. More recently, Cole has rendered into English the contemporary Arabic works of the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali, as well as Hebrew political poems by Aharon Shabtai and the novels of Yoel Hoffmann. His major recent poetic project was The Dream of the Poem, an anthology of Hebrew poetry of the Iberian Peninsula, from its 11th-century beginnings to the forced expulsions of 1492, published by Princeton University Press in 2007.