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The Raindrop's Gospel: The Trials of St. Jerome and St. Paula Maurya Simon Paperback: 9781932418347 $18.00 Hardcover: 9781932418378 $25.00 ©2010 order this title       Maurya Simon is the author of nine volumes of poetry, including 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).  Her fifth volume, A Brief History of Punctuation, was published in a limited edition by the fine letter-press book publisher, Sutton Hoo Press, and another letter-press collection of ekphrastic poems, WEAVERS, based on the paintings of Los Angeles artist Baila Goldenthal, was published by Blackbird Press in 2005.  Simon’s seventh volume, Ghost Orchid (Red Hen Press, 2004) was nominated for a 2004 National Book Award in Poetry, and her eighth volume, Cartographies: Uncollected Poems, 1980-2005, was published by Red Hen Press in September 2008. Simon’s ninth volume, The Raindrop’s Gospel: The Trials of St. Jerome & St. Paula, is due to be published in 2010 by Elixir Press. “Tamar,” an opera based on Simon’s eponymous verse libretto, its music composed by French composer, Eliane Aberdam, premiered at the University of Rhode Island in March of 2007. Simon has been a fellow at The MacDowell Colony and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, as well as serving as a 2005 Poet-in-Residence at the Vermont Studio Center. In addition, she has been a fellow at Hawthornden Castle in Edinburgh, Scotland and at the Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators in Visby, Sweden.  Simon has also served as a Visiting Professor at Lund University in Sweden.  She has twice been the recipient of a Visiting Artist Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, as well as having received a Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), 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.  In addition, Simon’s poetry has been translated into French, Rumanian, Bengali, Swedish, Spanish, and Farsi. Maurya Simon teaches at the University of California, Riverside and lives in the Angeles National Forest of the San Gabriel Mountains in southern California.
from The Raindrop's Gospel: The Trials of St. Jerome and St. Paula
Father of Punctuation In moments between preoccupations, in those pauses punctured by the sound of malm being ground up by bricklayers, or by the scolding magpies, or by Paula praying quietly with her garnet beads— the click and suspirations—he swabs his brow and thinks about what sets apart one interval from another: how a specific point must be molded into significance; how each phase of an Idea must be syncopated, or rotated, isolated or expanded, until its complexity rings as clear as brook water enshrined in a chalice. And so he devises a system of symbols to serve as toggles and bridles, pulleys and beams, sutures, store houses, stopgaps, funnels, fonts, ferrules, pipe joints, flasks, flashing, stoups, basins, hinges, splines, lids, signposts, road markers, chain links, spindles, faucets, footbridges, ducts, channels and frets, braces, gears, mauls and gavels, girders and girdles, brackets, clasps and gridirons, tiepins, torques and tourniquets. But he must strive to make his symbols swift and supple, like swallows’ wings, economical in stroke, uniform in use, non-ornamental, plain. The marginalia of his pages bespeak his toil, littered with the dashed off tokens, teardrop shapes, cryptographic crescents, quaint codes and puzzling ciphers of his mind’s hieroglyphic quest for shapely marks, some which signal when to stop, where to pause, how one thought unites another, or how it subdivides itself, or multiplies its meaning, or terminates a ponderous question. It takes him years to divine this system which neatly supersedes Greek’s network.  How precisely he lays out the deft marks—solidus, hyphen and punctus, a doubled virgula suspensiva, ampersand, subscript, vinculum, ivy-leafed hedera, parentheses, and last— the philosophical, obscure economy of the ellipses. He looks up from his fine labors: the night sky blackly mirrors back to him the roiling galaxy of quaking stars, fossil planets, the broadlit swath of the Milky Way—all glowing ornaments of God’s mind.