This close to the earth

by Enid Shomer

Moving through the cycle of birth, growth, and death, the poems of Enid Shomer are informed by physical knowledge, transforming it into rare and often startling insight. This Close to the Earth celebrates the courage to live intensely in the body. Here are loves, lives, and losses, retold with the energy that bare emotion commands. Peopled by almost touchable characters - John James Audubon, for instance sketching his birds in a pre-dawn light, and the unnamed narrator of "Among the Cows," who learns to "breathe with the Holsteins / as a form of meditation" - these poems explore the natural as well as the human landscape in search of the link between knowledge and the physical self. This Close to the Earth plumbs the deepest of human mysteries - the hunger for union with the people and things of this world.