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“More ambitious and abstruse than Simon’s Days of Awe, this volume is set in an abstract netherworld in which the poet gauges the effects of language, love and God upon our lives. In “Origins,” the first of the two long poems that make up the book, Simon conjures a primordial age in which the first scribe, a woman, gives birth to language, endowing existence with meaning by using words to name objects, images and emotions. Simon then wonders whether we “wrote ourselves into the world” to “defy our own mortality” or to “merge ourselves with that simple- / minded psyche some call God.” The poet skillfully mixes the concrete metaphors of the primeval theme with metaphysical imagery. In the second poem, “Spellbound: An Alphabet,” Simon states that “All language is a masquerade”; the words we hide behind are unable to give utterance to our constant awareness of loneliness and “the hugeness of each death.” Love, too, according to Simon, is another ruse by which we try to hide from the truth. Simon’s luminous way of perceiving thoughtfully leads readers through the dark mysteries of existence.”
— Publishers Weekly
“This poet’s third book consists of two long lyric sequences, both of which are largely successful. “Origins” is a re-creation of the imaginative life of a primitive artist; “Spellbound” is a series of lyrics based on the letters of the alphabet. This latter in particular triumphs over the seeming arbitrariness of its forming concept in a stylistic tour de force comprising a splendidly various and exploratory whole. The poem examines and reenacts our mundane physicality, spiritual ecstasies, and the intellectual search for meaning. The poet’s language is finely crafted and has a lovely musicality; her imagery is elegant yet passionate, inevitably embodying the rhetoric of the poem. Her only weakness is an occasional tendency toward didacticism, a natural temptation for a poet willing to undertake great themes. Highly recommended.”
— Library Journal, Frank J. Lepkowski