Diane Greenberg

The long black coat Diane Greenberg

Deeply personal poems evoking universal themes through a life centred in Jerusalem and reaching out to embrace other cultures, English countryside, a childhood in Wales and roots in Eastern Europe.

This is a collection of poems written over thirty years, gathered into sections, each of which follows an arc through related subject matter, focussed sometimes on journey or place - India, Oxford - and sometimes on mood.

The long black coat of the title was borrowed from an elegant friend to enhance a return trip to Paris, where Greenberg gravitated to the beloved Shakespeare and Company bookshop, setting for a poem reflecting on visits to Paris at different stages in her life.

The poet examines ubiquitous issues, amplified by her move with young children to a country of political tensions and existential dangers, distilled here in close observation, and in the retelling of events and encounters with family, friends, strangers and new-found distant cousins, survivors of the Holocaust.