LA SIRENA:
Reviewed in Cloudbank by Ann Fisher-Wirth
“It is a book to treasure and to think about. There is triumph in the tale—Melusina regains her family, her voice, the ocean—yet there is loss, for though she will live forever, she will never know those other gifts: a man who can hear her voice, the comfort of mortal love.”
THE WILDERNESS:
The Luminous World of Maurya Simon, reviewed by , Nov 26, 2020
“Simon’s poetry does not shout or rant. It’s not transgressive, though it doesn’t shy away from the physical or the distressing. It’s a quiet, reflective, lyric voice, one that’s easy to overlook in the current poetic clamor, but one that deserves to be read for the deep insight and beauty it brings to the poetic landscape. It includes selections from eight volumes and about 20 newer, uncollected poems that come together to form a rich tapestry.”
THE ENCHANTED ROOM:
Poetry, June 1987, pp. 170-172, reviewed by Alice Fulton
“Maurya Simon’s The Enchanted Room [is] a first book that delves beneath the skin of the quotidian in search of latent magic. The title is a metaphor for the heart, the body, childhood, and memory—which Simon…envisions as architectural space. The book has considerable reach, beginning slowly and gathering strength toward the end. Along the way, there are folkloric tales; love lyrics; dramatic monologues; historical narratives; and symbolist, oneiric poems. In Simon’s world, a door is usually something other than the aluminum screened variety. The poems occasionally strike a surreal note, though the intention is not to unhinge reality but to reveal its mystical underpinnings…Simon tries to see through things, as if they were composed of light rather than matter. And her vision leads the reader into a world rendered luminous, its radiance sharply, almost painfully defined…Simon’s gospel, simply put, is that everything—animate or inanimate—is potentially treasure.”
The New York Times Book Review, April 19, 1987, p. 20, reviewed by Lynne McMahon
“Much of the image-making in Maurya Simon’s first book, The Enchanted Room, is felicitous…The images are graceful, the cadences lovely; Ms. Simon has a sure sense of the musicality of line.”
Financial Express, New Delhi, India, June 1990, p.10, reviewed by Jaiboy Joseph
“In the emerging robotronic ethos, with the computer as God, [Simon’s] verses stand out in reassuring affirmation of some of the older values long cherished by classic poets, such as the love of nature and solitude, and a sensitivity and concern for fellow beings amidst the broil and turmoil of daily living.”
Small Press, October 1987, reviewed by Sheila Coghill
“Alchemical, archetypal, and perfectly balanced like the five-cornered base on which the philosopher’s stone is said to rest, Maurya Simon’s The Enchanted Room takes us through a cosmology of the imagination.”
DAYS OF AWE:
The Gettysburg Review, Winter 1990, reviewed by Floyd Collins
“Arguably, the strongest poetry [in Days of Awe] appears in the first part of the book, where Simon not only achieves the fullest range of her voice but also discovers those dramatic situations that allow her to transcend peculiarities of style. ‘Breakwater’ [for instance] delights in the danger and mystery of the sea, in the grotesque beauty of the ocean’s natural inhabitants.”
“Days of Awe is a very promising second collection. If the work is occasionally uneven, this is due to the subtle beauty and power of those poems that are most fully realized.”
Library Journal, June 1, 1989, reviewed by Rosaly DeMaios Roffman
“Simon’s poems do what her title suggests—they offer grateful testimony for choice moments of beholding.”
“Though adventures from her girlhood are recurrent—the poems that stand a little outside the poet offer an invitation different from biography. Steady and positive, these poems…stay with the concrete and deliver a positive, youthful message about some return of ‘a dark hope in its golden case.’”
Booklist, April 1, 1989, reviewed by Pat Monaghan
“In her second book, Simon continues to celebrate her lyric gift: spiders are “asterisks on the staircase’; childhood ‘a dream your body devised’; marriage ‘a strange sleep that tows the dreamer.’”
“She is at her best when she blurs the distinction between the various realities of fact and truth… The marriage of narrative to the precise image is her most significant feat.”
Harvard Book Review, Fall/Winter 1989, reviewed by Fred Marchant
“What are the days of awe referred to in the title of this, Maurya Simon’s second book?…It is the day an adolescent awoke to erotic desire…[or] a night the speaker and her sister slipped out to clamber on a breakwater, the waves boiling over their toes…But sex and death are only part of the origins of this awe, and it is in the title poem that we begin to get a sense of Simon’s complex imagining of it. ‘Days of Awe’ is a psalm to the poet’s mother on what seems to be her sixtieth birthday, and the poem is in part an effort to articulate what the mother has both given up and received in the process of marrying and having children. While noting these things, the poet at the same time seems struck by an awareness of how we are all part of a vast dance or round of relationships, a sense that we are defined by who we are to one another.”
[T]his poet of gentle transcendence also has a slightly discordant undertone. Maybe the whole rational web is just a dream. Such doubts rise to the surface in a few of the poems in this book…One hears the beginning of a quarrel here, or perhaps some other form of dispute or protest. It will surely be interesting to see how this undertone develops in Simon’s work.”
SPEAKING IN TONGUES:
Poetry Pilot (The Academy of American Poets Newsletter), December 1990
“In the two poems making up this book, Simon explores the ways in which language alternately screens and unveils the truth, offering one bright feather after another in her search for ‘a word for us.’”
Library Journal, August 1990, reviewed by Frank J. Lepkowski
“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.”
Hungry Mind Review, Winter, 1990-1991, p. 35, reviewed by Maggie Helwig
“Although her recent book of poems is entitled Speaking in Tongues, Maurya Simon writes of the written word and it power, drawing on much of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The first section of the book, ‘Origins,’ however, is set far before this tradition began. Simon meditates on the process that may have motivated the first person to transform a piece of her reality into carved symbols.”
“Simon’s consciousness of magic is apparent in flashes throughout her work, and ‘Origins’ is filled with bright moments, vividly realized landscapes and tableaux.”
“More than anything else, [Simon’s] poems are unified by the sense of the holy, the intuition that our words have a real, almost a physical, connection with the word that is God.”
Publishers Weekly, July 13, 1990
“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.”
“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.”
The Women’s Review of Books, Vol. VIII, No. 9, June 1991, reviewed by Diane Wakoski
“A poem of religious meditation, ‘Origins’ searches for a first cause and comes back to ‘the word’ as the source.”
“The successful parts of ‘Spellbound’ are Eliot-like in their concentration on the paradoxical vision—that silence is the most profound language (implication: because it leads to the written word). The paradox, that God is The Word but the ’word’ can never be spoken, fascinates Maurya Simon. This dilemma leads her back from silence, albeit brilliantly, to an old-fashioned but at least recognizable language. Like Eliot, she only gestures toward a world where the best poetry is invisible and the poet ultimately nonexistent. Exactly what terrifies [other poets]—the silence—is what attracts Simon.”
Calyx, A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, Summer 1992, Vol. 14, No. 1, p. 107, reviewed by Neile Graham
“The language of these poems is elevated but not inappropriate, as it shows the extent to which words can exist for their own beauty.”
“The questions Simon asks are profound: what is the meaning of meaning? Who are we in our relationship with language? What about the language we’ve lost? What is the meaning of life, of love, of death?”
“[Simon’s] exploration of self and other as part of one thing is what creates meaning, is why the metaphors of words/language and poetry have any value to us, and what makes the meditations of ‘Origins’ and Speaking in Tongues something to read and savor.”
THE GOLDEN LABYRINTH:
The Gettysburg Review, Winter 1996, pp. 60-63, reviewed by Dorothy Baressi
“Maurya Simon’s The Golden Labyrinth reads like gritty realism. Her examination of the ‘breakdown’ of nature and culture is located in South India, where she sets her poems’ speaker amidst poverty and disease unchecked by social programs or the wrenched conscience of poets.”
“It is relieving… to discover that Simon is alive to the delicate nature of such matters, and while these simple poems are at times graphic, they are not gratuitous, nor do they hold the speaker up as anything but a good, intelligent woman confronted by the heart-rendingly random universe.”
“Simon is at her very best in poems that quietly assert a hybrid sadness born of Western cynicism and Eastern acceptance. In this context, the balancing scale and cornucopia [she employs in ‘Russell Market’] are wonderfully dynamic images; they speak of earthly cycles, of endless rounds of pleasure and suffering being meted out, as evidenced by the lepers who ‘limp by on crutches,’ and the gleaming produce ‘like galaxy-driven planets.’ The tension Simon sets up between her tightly controlled, mostly end-stopped lines and the sensuous, overripe images of the fly and bananas like ‘huge pupae’ further reinforces the sense that there are limits, sometimes harsh, often sudden, in the midst of plenty.”
“Simon’s stylistic instinct is to mend rather than mirror the chaos she finds in the world, to find consolation in the orderliness of art.”
“Maurya Simon is tenacious in her struggle to comprehend the labyrinthine paths we travel between keening and dancing in a dangerous world. When her language does both, keen and dance, the results are beautifully urgent.”
Library Journal, May 1, 1995, reviewed by Doris Lynch
“[In] her fourth volume of poetry…[Simon’s] are a traveler’s poems, not a tourist’s. Not only does Simon describe the colorful jangle of the markets and streets, but she recognizes what is behind them. Her best poems counter physical sensations with spiritual longings, and her best works are elegies…Recommended for all collections.”
GHOST ORCHID:
The Georgia Review, Winter 2005, pp. 989-990, reviewed by Christine Gelineau
“Like a marriage made in equal parts passion and contention, the relationship examined in Maurya Simon’s Ghost Orchid is at once vexed and seemingly ineradicable. The relationship here is the one between the poet and God.”
“Her supple forms create order and disorder simultaneously, while the lyric stance of the poems appropriately connects her to the intimate everyman I of prayer and psalm.”
“Some may be surprised to find these poems of spiritual searching so rooted in the body. In ‘Doomsday’ God seems almost teasingly to arouse, and then draw away his hand. Is there a lover, or just a dream? One is reminded of the Song of Songs, or the sexually charged meditations of the medieval mystics, but where for the medieval God’s love was the adamantine given that was never completely enough requited, here God is the palpable absence. Absence becomes a kind of poignant presence, yearning itself a kind of meaning.”
“In images of often ferocious beauty, Simon has given us a book about faith which is without faith, yet is suffused with hope and love.”
The Sun, April 18, 2004, p. 10, reviewed by Ophelia Georgiev Roop
“Ghost Orchid is a spiritual book touching on a wide range of religious themes expressed at times with language hinting of the sensual.”
“These are not happy poems. They send off whiffs of melancholy, provoking us to also search our own souls and minds for hose elusive spiritual elements that torment us in our private moments of isolation. But they are also beautiful poems that challenge us to reflect upon the deeper meanings of life.”
Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, “Poets’ Corner,” May 23, 2004, p. R13, reviewed by Carol Muske-Dukes
“Maurya Simon has always been a soulful poet and in her new book, Ghost Orchid, she creates a kind of Augustinian force field, interrogating the soul, God and gods, even into the uncharted territories of life after death, beyond heaven and hell.”
THE RAINDROP’S GOSPEL:
Pank Magazine, May 3, 2010, pp. 1-4, reviewed by Nicelle Davis
“The Raindrop’s Gospel is a novel in verse that explores the possible romantic relationship between St. Jerome and St. Paula.”
“Simon’s poetic rendering of St. Jerome’s secret desires for St. Paula is erotica at its best. But like all things of quality, Simon’s erotica is not simple. As St. Jerome attempts to thwart his desire, his sexual urges intensify. Pleasure and pain make a cat and mouse game of his suffering—a suffering that is self-inflicted. St. Paula suffers from a similar affliction.”
“Simon’s poems suggest that desire, with its infinite energy, may be the closest thing humans have to a ‘living god.’ She goes even further in her theological investigations: if the face of God can be found in poetry, she means to look desire directly in its green eyes and question its purpose.”
CARTOGRAPHIES:
Prairie Schooner, Vol. 84, No. 1, Spring 2010, pp. 176-179, reviewed by Carrie Shipers
“This book, Maurya Simon’s eighth collection and sixth full-length volume of poems, is a keen investigation of what it means to be in the world. Throughout…a large part of [the self’s and poet’s] “touching and untethering” occurs through relationships to other people, to nature, and to stories as the cartographies of the book’s title are explored in four sections named for the realm the poems explore: soul, self, the world: mountains, and the world: city.”
“The possibilities and complexities of intimacy are an important trope in Simon’s collection.”
“Love may be invisible in [some of] these poems, but suffering is not. The book’s fourth section, ‘The World: City,’ maps a diverse geography of loss; locations include Los Angeles, New York, the Kuwaiti Zoo, the AIDS ward of the USC Medical Center, and Czechoslovakia, among them. Yet each of these poems demonstrates the same restraint and deliberate rendering of line displayed throughout the book as they explore how we are connected to each other and the broader world. Simon’s poems, both immense and particular, demonstrate skills similar to those she attributes to the nameless artist whose work is praised in ‘The Miniaturist’: ‘she can make matter matter as deeply as spirit./ Her universe is vast—a thimbleful of tides.’”
THE WILDERNESS: NEW & SELECTED POEMS, 1980-2016:
“Maurya Simon’s poetry has always echoed with the most ancient and sacred elements of the natural world, all the while charting the desires, trials, songs, and prayers of those of us who live among its daily, ever-changing drama. The gorgeous music of these poems is cast within a consoling formal calm and elegance, touched always by both wisdom and deep beauty. At times celebratory and at times rendered with a dark clarity, Maurya Simon’s poems resonate with a singular classical and devotional power that distinguishes her from all other of her contemporaries. Treasure this book.”
– David St. John, The Auroras and coeditor of American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry
“Maurya Simon’s language is lush, dense, sensual, and framed by a dazzling intellect. In this her New and Selected Poems, we come to see the full power of her symphonic sweep and the sheer dynamism of her compositional slant–- riffs, play, improvisation, harmonic resonance–- yet the resolve is always there, always a breathless moment. The opening poem has all the profundity of Rumi and the softness of Pablo Neruda. She explores themes of home, habitation, wildness, God, the scriptural erasure of women’s bodies and her subversive reinstatements, a robust love of the word and its various embodiments, and always more, always more. This is her own book of questions, her own gospel. Maurya Simon’s oeuvre is a deliberate world of grace, awe, beauty, delight and wonder. In these poems you will find rest, comfort, deep questions, some discomfort, but always joy. Read this book –you will be grateful for it.”
– Chris Abani, Sanctificum & Hands Washing Water
“The Wilderness, a compendious gathering of new and selected poems, makes clear what readers of hers over the years have increasingly come to feel, that Maurya Simon’s is one of the strongest, most humane, imaginative, compassionate and flat-out brilliant voices of her generation. The sensual immediacy of her vision, her explorations of non-western traditions, and the ease with which she moves between present-day America and other cultural milieus and historical periods—all of this is dazzling. I don’t think she is capable of writing a bad line. Readers of poetry who may have been unfamiliar with Simon’s work up till now should sit up and take notice.”
-Richard Tillinghast, Wayfaring Stranger, Robert Lowell’s Life and Work: Damaged Grandeur, and Poetry and What Is Real
“But what is Simon’s subject? To what does she give “a local habitation and a name”? In a forward to the poems of Joseph Brodsky, W.H. Auden said that Brodsky was “a traditionalist in the sense that he is interested in what most lyric poets in all ages have been interested in, that is, in personal encounters with nature, human artifacts, persons loved or revered, and in reflections upon the human condition, death, and the meaning of existence.” Like Brodsky, Simon has pursued these themes energetically, as her wonderfully moving poem, “Questions My Daughters Asked Me, Answers I Never Gave Them,” which opens The Wilderness, tells us. Offering equally compelling testimony to her dedication and brilliant handling of the great themes is The Golden Labyrinth, her fourth book. This is done in the context of India, where Simon resided during her Fulbright year, where context means mortality not as the subject of some freakish epiphany but as the daily climate of the streets, and suffering not as the occasional suburban tragedy but as the bitter air that fills those streets. In her “encounters with nature,” Simon (who lives high on Mt. Baldy in the Angeles National Forest), is at her best, unusually articulate and informed, a student of the natural world (an entomology major at Berkeley) with a deep understanding of the processes (“the whole heaving universe/ endlessly dancing”) rather than simply the names of flora and fauna as described objects.”
-B.H. Fairchild, (from his introduction to The Wilderness), The Art of the Lathe, Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower, Local Knowledge, and Usher: Poems