Inverting the pastoral, Sophie Cabot Black uses the keeping of animals and tending of land to interrogate the self and in turn reveal new truths about the social, economic, and political realities of contemporary America.
In Geometry of the Restless Herd, Sophie Cabot Black stages a powerful allegory for the social and political realities of our human world. Through hauntingly metaphysical poems set within a sheepherder’s domain, Black conjures fields of harvest and resurrection, of wagers and outcomes—animals to keep, and those destined for slaughter. Here, both singular voices and polyvocal choruses argue through discourse, asking who has the real power, and how are we to survive the violence we do to each other?
Black’s scenes are at once oneiric and raw: a squeaking gate wails against neglect; a field receives a runt body; a raccoon flees with egg dripping from its mouth—all while lush rains and long winters quiet the dead. Navigating both confining pens and wide-open spaces, these poems ask startlingly immediate questions about captivity and freedom, protection and exploitation, confronting the predicaments of late capitalism: industries of infinite regress, technologies that exceed us, and a soul stranded somewhere between expectation and redemption. Ultimately, these stark pastorals paint a moving portrait of life: as utterly inseparable from the world it inhabits.
What People Are Saying
“Cabot Black’s stunning, fable-like fourth collection (after The Exchange) urges readers, ‘do not expect the known; you were not there.’ This unusual and poignant volume is equal parts gothic and pastoral, full of incisively written imagery characterized by sparse stanzas that allow each line to shine: ‘everyone wants to be near,/ To manage the animal, the range/ of the easily lost.’ This sentiment is echoed again in ‘Almost Aubade’ (‘who came first/ now lost’), where absence and presence preoccupy the speaker. In the second section, Cabot Black reveals that ‘To be mistaken/ For another might be to survive.’ Yet the poems in this collection run no risk of being mistaken for another poet’s oeuvre. Singular and striking in their movements and tone, they are a testament to delicate beauty. Cabot Black walks the tightrope between the gnomic and the visceral, and sticks the landing with the utmost skill and tenderness.”
—from Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)
“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.”
–from Poetry Foundation
“I was not expecting a book of pastoral poems centered around sheep herding to be so scathing, fiery, and politically eloquent.”
–from The Poetry Society