The Time of Loved Ones

About this book

Rabab Helmy El-Bassiouni writes of love, bereavement and longing in a collection inspired especially by the grandparents who gave her an early sense of protection. The poems move between warm family memories, disappointment, winter loneliness and the ways time reveals the character of those around us. Written largely in Egyptian colloquial Arabic, the collection also widens its emotional field to public concerns, including Palestine. It is both an elegy for a vanished time and a celebration of the love that continues after separation.