Black drum

Enid Shomer's poems join the mind to the body and bring physical experience together with what we know, with language serving as the bridge that makes this union possible. Her images are deliberately shaped, and her gaze moves between tight, close-up details and sweeping, panoramic views.

The title poem stages a contest of sorts, in which the narrator and another presence wrestle for many minutes over which world should prevail. One is patterned with ornate borders and a steady core, while the other is organized around balanced opposites, with its surface split between sky and sea and a strip of land running between them like a scar. Throughout the collection, characters feel the constant movement of living in their bodies and the certainty of decay. In a poem drawn from the sketchbook of Gustav Klimt, the speaker admits to resisting the merely ornamental, then recognizes that the symbolic can move us precisely through what it leaves unstated.

The book holds that life on earth is shaped by change and impermanence, and that moments of sudden insight can arrive anywhere. Its settings include casinos and racetracks, where people chase ambitious and questionable schemes, and it also turns to dead or estranged relatives and to lost love. Shomer's message is to embrace whatever life offers, even within its constraints and in the midst of confusing upheaval.