The musical works on this album, Audenesque and Sadat, each exalt the transformative power of language through different means: one poetic, one oratorical. In Audenesque, Fairouz sets verse by the great 20th-century English poet W.H. Auden and late Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney; with Sadat, the composer evokes in an instrumental work the stirring life-story of slain Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. Woven among the musical recordings on the album are readings of the Auden and Heaney by Pulitzer Prize-winning Irish poet Paul Muldoon and fragments of spoken word by John F. Kennedy from one of his less-well-known speeches, including this: When power leads man to toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man s concerns, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.