In Black Drum, Enid Shomer fuses mind with body, knowledge with physical being, and affirms the capacity of language to accomplish this fusion. With clearly fashioned images, her focus often narrows on close particulars or leaps to wide angles, as in these lines from the title poem in which the narrator is battling a fish:

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.

The characters in Shomer’s poems discover the ceaseless motion of living in the body and the inevitability of decay. In “Notes from the Sketch book of Gustav Klimt,” Shomer boldly says, “I have always balked / at the purely decorative, / but then I saw that the symbolic / could stir us by its absence.”

Black Drum insists that life on earth speaks of transformation and transience; epiphany can happen any where, with “schemes illegal and grand” with slot machines, race horses, dead or estranged relatives, and lost love. Enid Shomer signals us to make the most of life, despite our limitations and in the face of bewildering catastrophe.

These poems give voice to the life of the first woman to fly faster than the speed of sound. While Jacqueline Cochran was alive, no man or woman in the world could match her records for speed, distance, and altitude flying. Founder and director of the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) during World War II, Cochran continued to fly competitively until she was sixty, owned and operated her own line of designer cosmetics for three decades, ran for Congress, and generally placed herself on the path of history. Having begun life as a foundling in the crushing poverty of a lumber company town of the Florida panhandle, she described her life as “a passage from sawdust to stardust.” Yet after her death she has barely been remembered.

Poet Enid Shomer brings back this mercurial, dazzling, powerful woman. These poems speak in her voice and in the voices of her mother, teachers, husband, confidants, and political opponents, shaped by Shomer’s consummate formal control and stunning lyricism.

Here is the good stuff: poetry written by women that actually excites the thinking reader. This anthology, spanning work of the last 75 years, will broaden its readers’ notions of what defines erotic poetry. For what is more intriguing, more satisfying than strong, self-assured writing? This groundbreaking anthology includes the most popular women writers—among them Sharon Olds, Elizabeth Alexander, Anne Sexton, Dorianne Laux, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, Lucille Clifton, and Louise Glück. These poets fully demonstrate that, far from being prurient, the erotic can permeate even the most mundane aspects of life, from reading a book to buying clothes.

At the same time, the collection affirms the enormous meaningfulness of poetry—its ability to express the inexpressible and to illuminate the most private and intimate of human experiences. The poets included here represent different ethnicities, geographies, social classes, and sexual preferences. The only characteristic they share is that they are women writing about sex.

Award-winning poet Enid Shomer’s new and selected poems explore the many facets of womanhood, from youthful desire to life’s later stages.

In Riptide, Shomer’s poems, written over the last forty years, illuminate the nature of being—whether human or kudzu—“this / headlong rush, this stammer / of green, this slow / stampede toward light.” Elegant lyrics, anchored in her beloved Florida landscape, use stunning imagery to convey Shomer’s rapturous engagement with the natural world. Longer sequences showcase narrative and formal dexterity while deftly bringing historical personae to life in poems such as “Pope Joan.” New poems powerfully examine mortality and sensuality as experienced in an aging body.

With lush music and deeply spiritual attention, Shomer’s work transforms the mundane into the numinous. Now in her early eighties, Shomer is still at the top of her form.

In Black Drum, Enid Shomer fuses mind with body, knowledge with physical being, and affirms the capacity of language to accomplish this fusion. With clearly fashioned images, her focus often narrows on close particulars or leaps to wide angles, as in these lines from the title poem in which the narrator is battling a fish:

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.

The characters in Shomer’s poems discover the ceaseless motion of living in the body and the inevitability of decay. In “Notes from the Sketch book of Gustav Klimt,” Shomer boldly says, “I have always balked / at the purely decorative, / but then I saw that the symbolic / could stir us by its absence.”

Black Drum insists that life on earth speaks of transformation and transience; epiphany can happen any where, with “schemes illegal and grand” with slot machines, race horses, dead or estranged relatives, and lost love. Enid Shomer signals us to make the most of life, despite our limitations and in the face of bewildering catastrophe.

These poems give voice to the life of the first woman to fly faster than the speed of sound. While Jacqueline Cochran was alive, no man or woman in the world could match her records for speed, distance, and altitude flying. Founder and director of the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) during World War II, Cochran continued to fly competitively until she was sixty, owned and operated her own line of designer cosmetics for three decades, ran for Congress, and generally placed herself on the path of history. Having begun life as a foundling in the crushing poverty of a lumber company town of the Florida panhandle, she described her life as “a passage from sawdust to stardust.” Yet after her death she has barely been remembered.

Poet Enid Shomer brings back this mercurial, dazzling, powerful woman. These poems speak in her voice and in the voices of her mother, teachers, husband, confidants, and political opponents, shaped by Shomer’s consummate formal control and stunning lyricism.

Here is the good stuff: poetry written by women that actually excites the thinking reader. This anthology, spanning work of the last 75 years, will broaden its readers’ notions of what defines erotic poetry. For what is more intriguing, more satisfying than strong, self-assured writing? This groundbreaking anthology includes the most popular women writers—among them Sharon Olds, Elizabeth Alexander, Anne Sexton, Dorianne Laux, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, Lucille Clifton, and Louise Glück. These poets fully demonstrate that, far from being prurient, the erotic can permeate even the most mundane aspects of life, from reading a book to buying clothes.

At the same time, the collection affirms the enormous meaningfulness of poetry—its ability to express the inexpressible and to illuminate the most private and intimate of human experiences. The poets included here represent different ethnicities, geographies, social classes, and sexual preferences. The only characteristic they share is that they are women writing about sex.

Award-winning poet Enid Shomer’s new and selected poems explore the many facets of womanhood, from youthful desire to life’s later stages.

In Riptide, Shomer’s poems, written over the last forty years, illuminate the nature of being—whether human or kudzu—“this / headlong rush, this stammer / of green, this slow / stampede toward light.” Elegant lyrics, anchored in her beloved Florida landscape, use stunning imagery to convey Shomer’s rapturous engagement with the natural world. Longer sequences showcase narrative and formal dexterity while deftly bringing historical personae to life in poems such as “Pope Joan.” New poems powerfully examine mortality and sensuality as experienced in an aging body.

With lush music and deeply spiritual attention, Shomer’s work transforms the mundane into the numinous. Now in her early eighties, Shomer is still at the top of her form.