The Blue Bridge
Poetry
Etruscan Press, 2026
$19.00, 109 pages ISBN 979-8990767829
It has been some time since I have touched the ocean, but every now and then, when I am near a landlocked body, whether pond or stream, I can imagine the scent of salt and the breeze almost emulates a coastal hum. I grew up in southcentral Alaska, and our summers always included drives to the Homer Spit, where I would spend hours on the shoreline of Kachemak Bay, looking at smooth pebbles and mussel shells and running toward the incoming waters.
This evening, water is on my mind, as is the way in which water seems to welcome a posture of reflection. As I transitioned from childhood to adulthood, from daughter to friend and spouse, my relationship with the coast changed as well, and I found myself most often seated on the sand—a coarse, compact glacial sediment—my palms stretched flat and my legs tucked underneath me, simply watching the tide and spending the day in thought. Water is on my mind because I have just read Maurya Simon’s newest collection of poems, The Blue Bridge, which encourages readers to immerse themselves in an environment of coasts and seas, from that of the womb to the Baltic and the Mediterranean.
The Blue Bridge, Simon’s twelfth volume, is a collection of celebration and lament, joy and grief, wit and poignancy, demonstrating that human existence resides firmly within both spheres, often simultaneously and, in many cases, due to human decision-making—whether individual, societal, or by government. The poems document the worsening climate crisis and species loss while, too, delighting in creatures like the firefly, the ibex, the junco, and treeswift. As such, Simon breaks the made barrier between the human and nonhuman, thereby clarifying what has been mythologized and recognizing the incredible togetherness and dependency between each being on the planet we call home. Simon’s poems depict the landscape of the Earth and the body of women in parallel fashion—through vibrant images and sensory details and through a connection to water. In doing so, her poems cultivate a twenty-first century genesis while also acknowledging the possibility of a planetary denouement. She urges, then, readers to see clearly, hear openly, and wrestle with the status of the world. If we do so, her poems seem to nudge, perhaps we can move toward meaningful change: toward a survival that benefits and considers all.
The collection is organized into four sections—beginning with “A Hive Mind” and “Family Matters” before closing with “A Palindromic Life” and “The Blue Bridge” itself. Each section reads like a chapter, a season, that is interwoven in content and Simon’s powerful use of description and observation, well incorporated into lyric meditations like “Landscape in December” (12) and “Residency” (64). Each section begins with an epigraph, and, throughout The Blue Bridge, as well, Simon includes quotes from writers and thinkers such as Adrienne Rich, Hafiz, Albert Einstein, and Walt Whitman, which is demonstrative of the collection’s belief in dialogue; her poems ask for open conversation between the living and the gone and between one species and another.
Through the practice of care-full recognition, The Blue Bridge centers the need for assessment and critical reflection. Simon’s poems willingly engage the myths we have inherited, socioculturally, and the myths we have created about one another and our families. In doing so, Simon offers instead narratives of clarity, grounded in the acknowledgment of human imperfection and error, while also confirming what is wondrous about our finite lives, our many pleasures, and the experiences shared between siblings, parents and children, and beloveds. In poems like “Fontaine le Port,” for instance, Simon provides an apostrophe to the speaker’s sister, reflecting upon a scene from seventy years prior and considering not only the passing of years, but all that has been lost in the span: “I watch us wading into that cold current, / unattended by our errant parents, two brave jeune filles / who believed time would never end because it didn’t exist” (74). Likewise, in the title poem, “The Blue Bridge,” the speaker stands outside on a dark winter night and remembers her mother, while also remembering the wilderness that was prior to the devastation that is global extraction: “Too many ghosts / harangue us for abandoning them, for severing / ourselves from nature” (60); in each memory, there is, again, the simultaneity of sorrow and a request for honest seeing and a possibility for change, even in such a late hour.
Maurya Simon’s The Blue Bridge is a collection of poems that documents, cares for, mourns, and—still—asks for hope. From sonnets and odes to meditations and elegies, Simon’s poetry recognizes the interdependence of human and nonhuman animals, the flora and fauna, and the need to exist differently. Settling into a summer solstice, Simon writes us anew: “May we be like those great windmills / perched on the cliffs, continually turning” (62), and, as her poetry requires that I, as reader, pause to observe and think, I am returned to the coastline of Kachemak Bay, where I again look out to the water and taste the salt on my lips.
Maurya Simon has authored twelve collections of poetry. Her volumes include La Sirena: A Novella in Verse, Days of Awe, The Enchanted Room, and The Wilderness: New & Selected Poems, 1980-2016. Nominated for a 2024 National Book Award, Simon’s poetry has been translated into Spanish, Greek, Hebrew, and Bengali, among other languages. She is Professor of the Graduate Division and Professor Emerita at University of California, Riverside.
Tara Ballard is a poet, essayist, and book reviewer. Her work has been published in The Atlantic, Poetry Northwest, North American Review, The Journal of American Culture, and elsewhere. She is an affiliate editor for Alaska Quarterly Review and a 2025 fellow at The New School’s Institute for Critical Social Inquiry. She is an assistant professor of English at an HBCU in the US-American South.