About the Book In the eye of Egypt´s denuding sun, the prodigal returns from Canada on four visits to her motherland, plunges into an environment energizing in its beauty/chaos, exhausting in its tension-riveted exchange with her mother. A cacophony of voices registers the rise and fall of love and withdrawal, understanding and rejection, dedication to parent/native land and yearning for a return home to Canada, smell of impending death and reawakened lust for life. A recurring fugue plays Canada´s greenery against Egypt´s landscape, backdrops to the love/alienation struggle between mother and daughter, until the two, having offered their single prayers in unison at Heliopolis Church, descend its marble steps hand in hand. Charcoal drawings enhance the contrapuntal melodies throughout the poems.

About the Author Born in Cairo, Egypt, Soraya Erian came to the University of Toronto on a Canada Council Scholarship to study English Literature. This land — with its people and culture — beckoned her, so she adopted it as her home. Perhaps Canada adopted her, for here she achieved her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees, taught college English, met her husband, and had their daughter and son, became a grandmother, pursued her love of writing, drawing/painting, had five books of poetry and drawings published, won numerous Best Poem awards including Cross-Canada and Cross-US contest, and engaged in free-lance writing. In art she seeks the essence of reality, and in poetry she draws upon subterranean images, music of the inner ear, the exhilaration of senses.