Soraya Erian (1936- ) came from Cairo, Egypt to study English Literature at the University of Toronto. After earning a Ph.D., she taught college English, married, had a daughter and son, became a grandmother, pursued writing, drawing/painting, and had five books of poetry and drawings published. She has garnered numerous Best Poem awards. In art, she seeks the essence of reality while in poetry, she draws upon subterranean images, music of the inner ear, and the exhilaration of senses.

Geanna Hanson shuns social norms to live in a whirlwind of delusional commitment to the wholeness of life. She is driven to luxuriate in passion, and to experience men as she would different flavours of ice-cream.

Alma, her childhood friend, enters a convent to dedicate her life to sanctity. In Gaza, she seeks spiritual redemption in the service of the women and children ravaged by war.

Canada's soul sweeps lakes, vast spaces, forests, fields, rivers and sounds in the loon's yodel. Its people are a microcosm of the world. A group -of multinational origins- mingles in Hamilton's west end. The narrator/ photographer is a lone woman of no name. She listens to the loon's cry at Lake Huron and takes black-and-white photographs to snap a glimpse of the soul of her country. Her husband Rashid is an Internist at Hamilton's Health Sciences Corporation. Their lives are the world's antipodes. Their son and daughter are world travellers. Their neighbours/relatives include: family doctor, physiotherapist, clothes designer, antique clock collector, business couple, real-estate woman and computer-investor husband, model/actress, and displaced family. The couple gets entangled in exhilarating extra-marial affairs, and adopts a son of questionable parentage In Quebec, the savour French culture; in Restigouche Reserve, the Mi'Kmaq way. They summer in Kincardine; they visit Egypt. Through memory and art the narrator probes what'sinvisible in her country and in her group's bizarre lives. While Rashid seeks to prolong life and shoulder other's problems, the narrator reaches for an art to mirror symbiotic life in Canada's heartland.

When the dream is "over there," "here" suffers from a lack of reality. This dilemma faces people who leave their native land for a new home in another land. The Jasmine Garden embraces their yearning for a new life and their obstinate adherence to the old dream; it presets their continuing search for identity in their native land and their unwitting immmersion in its dangers. It portrays Canadian couple's experience of love and sexual dalliance, religious co-existence and terrorist intrigue in the venerable land of Egypt with American presence on its soil. Yasser and Nadia return to Egypt to bolster a sagging marriage, but they become submerged in their native country's political upheaval. In this ancient land of grandeur, turbulent events drive them into martial deception, danger, seperation, despair and rediscovery of their home.

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.