Assembling the Shepherd, by Tessa Rumsey
(University of Georgia Press, 1999)
What if you could use a map to document the usual map-things, like places and landscapes. But then you could also use it to account for time and individual people and the feelings you had when you were seeing the landscape and being with the other person there? There are meadows that might give you a different feeling depending on whether you visited them with X, and whether they were blue meadows or yellow meadows at that time. And what if you could designate a specific city on the map as the capital of all this emotional history? It could be like the city is existing in the abstract while also existing in the your memory. The city would probably be the main feature of this map, because it’s the easiest point of reference. And it would fit conceptually with the map, because it’s where most of the emotionally relevant experiences happen.
It’s useful to think of Tessa Rumsey’s Assembling the Shepherd as a map like this, made as a four-dimensional document. Remember, the map covers time, so this map requires a kind of gigantic imaginative leap away from the two-dimensional. Isn’t a book of poems good for these kinds of imaginative leaps? Yes, that’s why Tessa Rumsey wrote this map as a book of poems! Assuming, of course, that this four-dimensional map is possible. Fortunately, it is a book of poems. And considering a book of poems’ normal facility with emotional landscapes, it seems a fairly natural step to designate it a four-dimensional document as well.
However, Rumsey’s book is more a thoughtfully geography when it comes to the subject of lost love, and of the dilemma inevitable when the speaker is moving past that loss even as it’s continually present to her. In particular, Rumsey’s reference to this city as a place where love happened, where the memories still feel fresh and alive to her, helps explain why it’s so hard to “move on” from this past. After all, who could possibly remove an entire city, especially when “Our city begins with a description / of heaven?” (from “Parable for the Sundial”)
To poetry’s great benefit, Rumsey is smarter than some mere city. For if a city represents meanings that she had made for herself, then it’s going to face the same skepticism as any meaning-making enterprise. For instance, in “The Smallest Effective Distance,” Rumsey explicitly refers to the romance that has passed. “You are my ex & thus / the past must outshine the present in a way that hurts / just to look at.” Romance is a sharp and ingenious craftsman capable of the most durable presences. But Assembling the Shepherd is not only romantic. Let’s call it romantic-conceptual. Like in the version of “Diagram of Faith” on page 30, “the rush hour of eternal return of eternal / renounce, as if multiplicity were the answer to ambivalence, as if / a wheel’s point of stillness hinged upon its spokes’ psychotic dance.” To call romance a system of passions connected with pronouncements connected with attitudes might be a modest description. Rumsey likes causal chains, especially when they’re reorienting meaning. And especially when they express the struggle that usually attends letting go of love.
Perhaps the causal chain is one of the ways you go about destroying a city. You propose a new link between cause and effect. If planting the bomb in “Bluebells” might seem a bit violent, how about if the bomb creates a series of flowers in bloom? How about if you were to erase that old city where love happened, and replace it with Spring? Assembling the Shepherd is aggressive and often byzantine in its style. Losing love is confusing, though. Especially when love never leaves of its own volition. So then “a bystander explodes, inside my brother’s laughter, into springtime,” and all is better. The shepherd is ready to be assembled, and to usher in springtime, and to materialize new romantic-concdeptuals.
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Assembling the Shepherd
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