Red Pomegranates: Love, Beauty, and Deceit. Arabic Poetry about, for, and by Women

This four-part book focuses on the voice of women in principally the Arab and Islamic world, a world which because of demographics has become almost universal. By employing the symbol of the red pomegranates the authors symbolize a woman's nurturing, life-sustaining, and loving powers while simultaneously extolling her grand physicality and sexual appeal. In addition, this is a book about love, both physical and spiritual, and how its presence serves to regulate human life, while its absence exacerbates human problems. In either case, the language of discourse is the medium of poetry, discourse in the vernacular being totally inadequate to achieve the goal of explaining and expressing love's role and goal in human existence. The role of love and the female poets, ancient and modern, who have written about it are herein praised, enshrined, extolled and accorded their proper place in the history of poetic communication.