The pieces included in Points in Time are brief and dreamlike, and entirely effective in painting a historical portrait of Bowles' adopted homeland, Morocco. Although written twenty-five years ago, these short prose poems are surprisingly effective at exploring the divide between Islam and the West, and do so without any overt moralizing on the author's part. As always, Bowles is a prose stylist of the first order, and the crystalline nature of his writing is all the more effective at these shorter lengths, where every word has such a significant footprint. ( )