Geometry of the Restless Herd

Geometry of the Restless Herd, Sophie Cabot Black’s fourth collection, troubles the intersection between pastoral and metaphysical traditions. A speaker, an agent, and a herd of sheep animate this eschatological narrative about shepherding that recalls Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris and Tessa Rumsey’s Assembling the Shepherd.

Lovers as wolves, animals as witnesses, and the speaker as watcher (“the ewe refuses // to rely / on my vigilance: the watcher, // the watched, / and what comes between—”) reveal a fluidity between human and animal worlds, underscoring what can go wrong when the flock—as metaphor for humanity—is left shepherd-less or in the wrong hands. “With one word I turn the dog / Who turns the sheep,” Black writes in this delineation of collective and personal conscience.

Themes of departure, Orphic return, labor, value (“When is it worth my cost”), calculated risk, marriage, multiplicity, error, the perils of choosing, and the responsibility of authorship prevail. The idea of the world as a book that we live inside of, while writing, serves as anchor in a work that seeks, in lieu of certainty, to “weigh the distance” and “tend without forecast.”

“We form the form as we form,” Black writes, in one poem, and in another:

no angle
with which to see

myself in full:
the curve

of who I am and what
I make

only turning
into the almost

of another

Form and content collude symphonically in Black’s lean, laconic poems. From catalog verse and aphorism, to persona poems in the voices of animals, language emerges as a co-creationary power (“what you get to choose / is how to call it”) in poems dedicated to poets including Lucie Brock-Broido, Franz Wright, and Linda Gregg. The thrust of Geometry of the Restless Herd, while taking account of our straying, incomplete, and changeling natures, is toward revelation:

How one pivot
Can bring the world

To believe
Itself

Whole
And worthy.