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STARS AT NOON: Poems from the Life of Jacqueline Cochran
(University of Arkansas Press, 2001) Enid Shomer's Stars at Noon is the book to give to the next person you encounter who complains that contemporary American verse is self-obsessed. The collection, Shomer's fourth, is made up of six sequences of dramatic poems that resurrect Jacqueline Cochran, America's second lady of the air- second only to her friend, Amelia Earhart.... Her resumé included founding and operating a cosmetics business, serving as a roving journalist after the war, and running for U.S. Congress. Mindful of her unlikely beginnings (a foundling, she received only three years of schooling), Cochran described her life as a journey "from sawdust to stardust." Shomer traces that trajectory keenly and engagingly, writing in a variety of voices that summon up an era as well as a life. Working from her subject's archived papers, Shomer narrates Cochran's childhood indirectly, using the device of letters (one from the mother who abandoned her, three from teachers). By age seventeen, the girl has become a mechanic and a hairdresser who envisions going into business under the trademark "Jacqueline Cochran, Cosmetiste/Engine Valves Ground and Pincurls Set/with the Same Twist of the Wrist" ("The Death of Bessie Mae Pittman"). Her character unfolds in poems about love and flight, then deepens in those in which she speaks of the war, Earhart's disappearance, another colleague's death, and her own miscarriages. Some of the most sardonic and entertaining poems treat her foray into postwar politics. |
"...Cochran's life merits attention, and Shomer summons up that life adroitly, throwing her voice with a ventriloquists' savoir faire and picking her moments with a playwright's sense of drama. Her wit and skill as a versifier buoy these monologues and dialogues....From conception to execution, Stars at Noon is a smart, versatile collection."
-Poetry
"How refreshing it is, when so many books of poetry seem interchangeable, to come across Enid Shomer's marvelous sequence,Stars at Noon. Jacqueline Cochran's life was an astonishing one, and it is evoked by Shomer with deftness and empathy. As a work of visionary hagiography, it is comparable to Robert Penn Warren's great Audubon poem. In some alternate universe, where poetry is afforded the respect it should have, Stars at Noon would be an enormous (and deserved) popular success."
-David Wojahn
"These poems are poignant, witty, and well-turned. This book not only makes a major contribution to the annals of women and the turbulent era Cochran lived in, but because it is immensely readable, it may break the sound barrier between historical facts and passionate feelings."
-Maxine Kumin
"Jaunty, audacious, tough-and filled with soul, Enid Shomer's Stars at Noon recreates an American life. Like the subject of her book, Shomer's poetry flies, whipsaws, and is in love with words."
-Alicia Ostriker
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Excerpt:
THE WORLD GOES BLACK Flight attaining Mach 1, Edwards Air Force Base, California, June 1953 Take-off How featureless the earth as it recedes, each green valley and hill devoid of curves and definition, settling into swirls of rubbed pastels, the salt flats below me ridged like a tidal sea and the sea with its rolling feathers suddenly still. All around me, sky streams past, long blue corridor to the night. Huge clouds stretch from horse heads to a kind of history, another world curled in their roiling manes. Ascent Today I thank God for my hands, so big they attract stares even manicured, nails short as a general’s patience. Big fidgety anchors, Mama laughed, Keep them in your lap! They seem enlarged, the Army doctor wrote, by some crushing physical task. “Like shucking oysters?” I saluted him so they dwarfed my cap. I’ve tried dark gloves so women wouldn’t notice. It made things worse when I took them off. In WASP dress white gloves, clown hands waved. They should see my feet. |
Dive from 45,000 Feet Swathed in silence I drop, the bones of my skull thrumming against my brain. Time is like an elastic band the way it stretches and zings back. My audience with the Holy Father-- four minutes, his chamberlain warned-- stretched into twenty-eight, passing in one quick exhilarated gasp while these forty-five seconds slowed to cold molasses, time enough to review a parade of my life, catch destiny waiting outside my cockpit for one mistake, red-eyed as the eject button. I fasten on the machmeter, the needle approaching and approaching, like a body forging toward pleasure, that point when I begin to beg when nothing else matters and the world goes black as the world of the blind where touch is everything, the only thing, the thing next to holy |
