Maurya Simon's poetry explores the mysterious,
elusive intersection where the sacred and profane meet. It's a
difficult place to render truthfully, but by paying meticulous
attention to the tangible world of small gestures and fleeting
experiences, she is somehow able to capture grace—or at least register
its passage. Like the deep underground tanks of liquid that scientists
build to learn more about the massless, tiny neutrino, Simon's poems
give us the sense that we've glimpsed a trace of transcendence. Whether
she is writing about fourth century saints or men fishing at a lake
while their wives prepare a picnic, Simon invests the world with
meaning. Her poetry exemplifies what the critic George Steiner has said
is the goal of all art—the ability to convey a sense of "real
presence."
To read Maurya Simon's poem, "Two Saints in Bethlehem," from Image #37, click here.
Maurya Simon's Current Projects
For
the past several years I've been visiting and photographing ancient
rock art, including dolmens, burial sites, cave paintings, and
petroglyphs, created by a number of early cultures—from the Paleolithic
(in Europe) to those tough and inventive peoples inhabiting the
Americas—in order to write a book-length sequence of poems that
explores the interstices of the spirit world with our waking world,
both in the past and present. This book continues and extends my
earlier poetic investigations into how the realms of the sacred and
profane interact to deepen and enrich our lives.
I have recently completed my seventh volume of poems, a novel in verse entitled The Raindrop's Gospel: The Trials of St. Jerome & St. Paula. This books dramatizes the lives, work, and relationship of these two 4-5th century saints. I am also working on an anthology of ekphrastic poetry, that is, poetry based directly upon visual works of art.
Biography...
Maurya Simon is the author of The Enchanted Room and Days of Awe (Copper Canyon Press, 1986, 1989), Speaking in Tongues (Gibbs Smith, 1990), and The Golden Labyrinth (Univ. of Missouri Press, 1995). Her fifth volume, A Brief History of Punctuation, was published in a fine letter-press, limited edition by Sutton Hoo Press in 2002, and her sixth volume, Ghost Orchid,
is due from Red Hen Press in March 2004. Simon is the recipient of a
2002 Visiting Artist Residency from the American Academy in Rome, a
1999-2000 NEA Fellowship in poetry, a University Award from the Academy
of American Poets , the Celia B. Wagner and Lucille Medwick Memorial
Awards from the Poetry Society of America, and a
Fulbright/Indo-American Fellowship in Bangalore, South India. Simon has
been a fellow at Hawthornden Castle in Edinburgh, Scotland, and at the
Baltic Centre for
Writers and Translators in Visby, Sweden, as well as
a lecturer at Lund University in Sweden. Her poems have appeared in The
New Yorker, Poetry, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, The Kenyon
Review, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Grand Street, Agni,
Ploughshares, Shenandoah, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, New
England Review, and in more than thirty anthologies. Simon teaches
in and Chairs the Creative Writing Department at the University of
California, Riverside and lives in the Angeles National Forest of the
San Gabriel Mountains, in Southern California.
The paintings that grace the cover of Maurya's books of poems, The Enchanted Room and Days of Awe were painted by her mother, L.A. artist Baila Goldenthal.
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