Grandpa's Syllables

“Some turbulent process related to language” gave birth to this book, at once a paean to and elegy for the life force embodied in the speaker’s granddaughter and muse, Isabella. Working in 11-syllable lines, Simon trains his fierce focus on details small as a spider supping on dew and large as “a cathedral made of salt and bread.” The poems are shaped with subtle control, and they move with grace and breathe to a place “where metaphor breaks down, fragrant as compost.” I was most happy to be taken there, and you will be, too. —Rebecca Foust, author of All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song and God, Seed: Poetry & Art about the Natural World. John Oliver Simon, the by now somewhat mythical Berkeley bard of California Street, where he has lived for a lifetime since the fabled ‘60’s, offers us a new collection of poems, nearly all sonnets (a formalistic feat in this day of either radical experimentalism or banal workshop look-a-likes). The apparent structural formalism cannot disguise the word-master at play, for these sonnets are playful, indulging in scientific neologisms, lyrical musings about his own mortality, his granddaughter, and the lush rampant observations of an urban gardener. It’s as if he has taken the microcosm of his own backyard with its myriads of insects and flora and their exotic piebald nomenclature and expanded it into the macrocosm of the poet who has read deep and studied hard from the many schools available to him. Think Neruda with a John Muir accent. Intelligent, often witty, this sequence never stops demonstrating Simon’s command of lyric poetry and respect for its traditions. —Ivan Argüelles, author of Ars Poetica This book, a striking original, moves and works in marvelous ways. John Oliver Simon, a writer forever alert, has evolved a concise poem-form customized to record and embrace all the received wisdom anyone might wish to pass down to grandchildren or to countless descendants. As its title suggests, Grandpa's Syllables—grand and jammed with pauses and lyrical silence— jumps with beats, conceits, and vivid language. Addressing an adored granddaughter, the poet shares his lifelong experience and everyday insights. That poems can get down is certainly no secret. That a lifelong poet like Simon—in the guise and voice of an impassioned elder—can tell and retell and with such splendor and depth all of our own stories stuns." —Al Young, California Poet Laureate Emeritus