GHOST ORCHID - Softcover

Maurya Simon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1888996846 ISBN 13: 9781888996845

Publisher: Red Hen Press, 2004

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Maurya Simon is the author of The Enchanted Room and Days of Awe (Copper Canyon Press, 1986, 1989), Speaking in Tongues (Gibbs Smith, 1990), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and The Golden Labyrinth (University of Missouri Press, 1995). A fifth volume, A Brief History of Punctuation, was published in a limited edition by the fine letter-press book publisher, Sutton Hoo Press, in 2002. Simon s sixth volume, Ghost Orchid (Red Hen Press, 2004) was nominated for a 2004 National Book Award in Poetry. A new, limited edition, letter-press collection of ekphrastic poems, WEAVERS, based on the paintings of Los Angeles artist Baila Goldenthal, was published by Blackbird Press in October 2005, and Simon s eighth volume of poems, The Mapmaker s Art, is forthcoming in 2006-07. Tamar, an opera based on Simon s verse libretto, will premier at the University of Rhode Island in the Spring 2007. Simon was the recipient of a 2002 Visiting Artist Fellowship 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, the New England Review, and in more than fifty anthologies. Simon s poetry has been translated into French, Rumanian, Bengali, Spanish, and Farsi. Maurya Simon teaches in the Creative Writing Department at the University of California, Riverside. She lives in the Angeles National Forest of the San Gabriel Mountains, in Southern California.

Review

n Ghost Orchid, Maurya Simon s stunning poems of longing, angels curl their hair with corkscrews, Lucifer s moustache [is] glazed with powdered sugar, in Hell, the Devil doles out / ice cubes today to four hijacked come-latelies, and If God had a wife, she d be a doozy. Lyrical, melancholic, humorous, these fresh, ambitious poems take us literally into untravelled territory. --Maxine Kumin

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. --Mark Jarman

Midway in her poetry s journey, Maurya Simon, one of our country s finest writers, now offers us her God book, brilliantly crafted but also Blakean in its powers of illumination and insight. Ghost Orchid is a grace-haunted translation of the hieroglyphic heart, a visonary marriage of heaven and hell consummated somewhere near the crossroads of the spiritual and erotic. We encounter not only God, who loves us all to death, but also the albino angel, a helium virgin, / who lifted off into space like a chrome rocket, and Beelzebub, poet laureate of latrines and kingpin of sinners. A true master of metaphor, Simon here performs poetry s ultimate task: the alchemy of body and soul. --B.H. Fairchild

About this edition

• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1888996846
• ISBN 13: 9781888996845
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80