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"Of recent titles, perhaps only Donald Hall's Without for the late Jane Kenyon can be placed beside this book for its ability to affectingly convey the bald specifics of private loss. The impact of Shomer's book is palpable."
-Poetry "If metaphysical poetry is that in which the senses show the way to the extrasensory, even to the divine, then Shomer is a metaphysical poet. Her work is deeply sensual, deeply sexual, and deeply spiritual at once. Like other metaphysical poets, Shomer twists language to force new meanings through it. Unexpected juxtapositions of nouns, startling verb choices, piled-up appositives all work to stretch the language beyond its usual limits. The effect is both clarity and strangeness....Exemplary work." -Booklist "Enid Shomer takes her place as one of our most strikingly sensuous and accomplished poets....Shomer's powerful figures of speech are the hallmark of her arresting art. Her poems glow and explode with discovery and surprise...If I have given too many quotations in this brief review, that is because Shomer's art humbles the critic in me and compels me to the simple and spellbound 'look at this!'" -Poet Lore "Beautifully crafted work that remains powerful even after several readings. Shomer uses the stuff of daily life to create imagery that surprises us with its originality... She has a great gift for taking the highly personal and transforming it into the universal." -Kalliope |
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Excerpt from BLACK DRUM
At last the fish thrashed out of the water as if to break the black bars on his side. One eye felt the air, the dry death of it, then he plunged again in downward spirals. We had been struggling for ten minutes—a lifetime—over whose world would prevail: his, with its purled edges and continuous center, or mine with its yin and yang, its surface incised into sky and sea, the land like a scar between. A crowd had gathered, you could sense their excitement the way you feel tension on the line when something strikes. You could hear the awe when they looked at what I was battling—a creature who belonged farther out, an ocean liner in a backwater bayou. My arms ached with happiness, my sight narrowed to the place where the line disappeared, the rod bent to a hairpin, the fish pulling at me like religion or god with the strength of what can't be seen. |
Finally, like all saints, he tired,
he became more flesh than force, flapping on his side, heaving for air, the marble eye lidless against the sun, the green water gilding the silver bands between the black. I have not missed my father since he died, but now I want to tell him about the tackle, test, bait, how the drag was set, though he'd disparage my catch, remind me of the snook he bragged of courting for seven years by the pilings of his condo. My father, gone entirely sour by the time I was five, lived for two things: the racetrack and the pier. And I was nothing to him, I was only a noise that shattered his nerves a mouth chewing too loudly. Whatever kept him together was thin and taut as this line. Now someone lowers a basket net to cradle the fish as we hoist him to the dock, hooked through the lip, a gash in the beautiful tail like a broken wish bone. And there the scarlet blood. I had forgotten his blood. I had forgotten that every beauty involves a wound. Now I pull the fish from the mournful sound in which he lived. His gills beat like stubby wings, the red plush pleats turning pink, all the fight gone out of him. And now the fish is like a man whose agony was mysterious, whose every gesture, every silence, was a roar. |