One of the best connoisseurs of ancient Egyptian literature, and ancient Egyptian poetry in particular, presents a volume of some of the most beautiful love songs from the Nile Valley during the New Kingdom era. A special advantage of this edition, apart from the excellent translation and strict adherence to the authentic text, is its completion with the original written in hieroglyphs. This makes this book a wonderful christomathy for students of Ancient Egyptian - a combination of elegance, academic value and inspirational vitality that is extremely rare.
Foster certainly makes the language of these poems more accessible for modern readers than other translators do. That makes these translations a bit controversial among the more conservative translators and scholars, but it helps them come alive on the page.
These poems are tender, lush, scandalous, and always interesting to read. They're also one of the best peeks we have into the fantasies and artistic sensibilities of a culture over 3,000 years in the past. That link to the past is alienating at times, discomfiting at others, but sometimes it reaffirmed that people haven't really changed all that much.