The Canticles is a collection of brief but intense lyrics reflecting the ups and down in the poet's life over a two year period. With these poems Sharon Marcus offers an inner chronicle of the taste of heaven and the roar of hell, one foot connected to the divine, the other to the world.

Joined to The Canticles is Behind Jebbal Amman 1989, a longer poem from the same time frame, lyrical, mystical, but deeply embedded in the suffering of a whole people she visited on the other side of the world.

Seafaring Songs, the concluding section, also brief and deeply mystical lyrics, belongs to a more recent time in the poet's life, to her continuing analysis of the radiant opposition between the light and the dark.