Maurya Simon – författare

For what does the spirit yearn? To know God. Maurya Simon’s wonderful new book, Ghost Orchid, throws fresh light on that traditional question and answer in poems full of the sensuous language of the “Song of Songs” and the graphic images of modern disaffection. She shows us good and evil, both conscious and unconscious, and, even as she doubts such a reality, asks for God’s “touch upon our waking lives.” The yearning to know God, the legacy of human generations, has its latest expression in these ravishing poems.

The poems in Cartographies travel new territory, exploring the heart’s changeable cartography and the soul’s uneven terrain. They map the familiar, and always complex world of the San Gabriel Mountains, as well as nearby Los Angeles, with its cultural richness and social/political tensions. Divided into four sections—The Soul, The Self, Mountains, The City—Cartographies investigates our profound relationships with time, nature, love, and death.Simon finds meaning in unexpected locales, from the "Rorschach" on a butterfly’s wings to a barrio bakery, and in the briefest of moments, evoked by the plaintive voice of a spider, or provoked by a breathless escape from an avalanche. These poems record the paradoxes present in our daily lives, those interstices of yearning and mourning or fear and celebration that reveal the deep wells and turbulence of human consciousness. Simon apprehends the elegiac within the purest moments of joy, and intimates catharsis within despair. She opens the mind’s windows to small miracles provoked by the barest glimmers of wonder and hope.