Sophie Cabot Black is one of our readers at the New York City Poetry Festival this year. Catch her reading at 5:30pm with Copper Canyon Press on July 14th at the Brinkley Stage. Read on for a review of her latest poetry collection.
I did not have one specific idea of what to expect when I delved into Sophie Cabot Black’s new book of poems, Geometry of the Restless Herd, but I must say I was not expecting a book of pastoral poems centered around sheep herding to be so scathing, fiery, and politically eloquent.
Every poem in this collection unfolds upwards from a strong and direct foundation of candid truth and observation into a soaring call to examine oneself, one’s surroundings, and one’s daily endeavors. Cabot Black weaves threads of connection between the layered, convoluted systems that make up our everyday contemporary reality, and measures how deep they go in an exploration of human relationships with work, nature, animals, and each other.
The first section of the collection starts off with “And So,” an ode to wildness about running off “Beyond and into our own summer” and leaving behind one’s home. This first section is preceded by the standalone poem “Coyotes,” addressing “the in between/ of where it was/ and where it might/have been,” a question which comes up throughout the collection.
In the poems which immediately follow these two, Cabot Black delves into a comparison of agriculture–specifically sheep herding, human-animal relationships, and human-land relationships–to contemporary post-industrial capitalism.
Poems like “Democracy Until,” “To Burn Through Where You are Not Yet,” and “Sanctuary” address the illusory nature of individualism, ownership, and freedom, particularly how systems of power determine and assign value to people and animals based on what service they can provide or how much work they can do, to the detriment of everything but profit. Herds of sheep being taken to a pasture which they don’t realize is confined from the world outside loom in similarity to people being funneled through cities, buildings, paperwork, and systems. The following section from “Democracy Until” particularly struck me:
My barn, your barn; we were never ready
To know the herd. Each coming from somewhere else
Fills in until whatever might be missing
Does not easily fit. And so the field
Becomes the shape the market requires,
And to set fire just before heading on
Is also to say it does not matter
Which part is played
But that it gets played… (Cabot Black 8).
Throughout the collection, Cabot Black explores what it means to play a part, especially as a worker. “To Burn Through Where You are not Yet,” “Silo,” “Bringing in the Stray,” “Handbook of Risk,” and “Of Use,” among others, highlight the mournful futility at the end of a day, or lifetime, of work for someone else. The speakers in several poems are distinct characters who have their own perspectives on and approaches to work, and include what I read as multiple herders both narrating and being addressed, foremen, agents, borrowers, and children.
The pastoral landscape that Cabot Black paints is at times desolate, lonely, and harsh, and the recurring speaker repeatedly voices regrets about the dreams and freedoms they have sacrificed in the name of work for someone else’s profit as well as marriage in a few poems. However, a strong hopeful and sweet note comes through simultaneously, in the cyclicality of nature and the creatures who inhabit the world of the poetry.
As Cabot Black questions the meaning of ownership over land and the meaning of being part of a family and a community when people are pitted against each other for profit, she simultaneously depicts the sweetness, intimacy, and stillness of being with others, whether human or animal. A strong connection and indebtedness to the land shines up out of these poems as an answer towards the question of meaning and strength. Connection, community, and storytelling are the tools of remembrance and resistance at play in these poems, and at our disposal as Cabot Black emphatically reminds us.
Written by Lily Naifeh-Bajorek
Writer Bio: Lily Naifeh-Bajorek is a multidisciplinary writer, musician, and artist studying in the creative writing program at Oberlin College. Currently, she is interning at The Poetry Society of New York, where she is helping plan and put on the 13th Annual New York City Poetry Festival and working on the Summer 2024 edition of Milk Press. In her free time she makes zines and puts on shows to celebrate her friends’ music and art. She hopes to publish several books, release a million albums, and open a venue/art and poetry space someday. Follow her on Instagram @trashprincessdestroy