The Names of Things

Like an artist's sketches for a painting or a poet's jottings of rhymes, Morrow catches the colors, textures, ambiances and sensations of the Egyptian desert, Cairo, the Sudan, the flight of birds and crawling creatures and, above all, her enthrallment with language and word origins, all of which she has threaded here with musings on her family and her search for purpose. Evocative as these sketches are, they do not have the lucid organization of a coherent work. From random snatches, we learn that as a Barnard student Morrow studied Arabic and Egyptian hieroglyphs, that she has been on anthropological digs, that she has lived on an abandoned tour boat in the Nile and an apartment in Cairo, that she has accompanied a family of nomads through the desert and that a grant for work she never clearly describes here provided her with the means to do all of this. Although she is disconcertingly vague about time lines, friendships and other connections, Morrow's keen sensibilities and evocative prose are seductive. (June)