Assembling the Shepherd

Tessa Rumsey

Tessa Rumsey's first collection of poetry is something special. She's the first poet-- that I know of, anyway-- to take the style, whatever you want to call it (I always thought of it as dada, but with a touch more absurdist sensibility), of the poets who congregated around Sulfur magazine in the early nineties-- Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge is the first to come to mind-- and really make it accessible to an audience not steeped in such things. Rumsey's work has the lyrical thickness of those who came before (and, of course, her many grandparents the language poets), and is often just as disconcertingly obtuse, but you come out the other end feeling as if you read something that really did make sense; in some ways, Assembling the Shepherd is the other side of the coin of Timothy Donnelly's brilliant, willfully obscure Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit.

Looking at Assembling the Shepherd as a whole book is liable to leave even the closest reader frustrated. The way to look at it, especially if you're reviewing it, is piece by piece, with "piece" not necessarily designating a whole poem; in some cases, it runs across poems (such as "The Sundial," which begins with Section IV where the previous poem ended at Section III; no other commonality can be found between the two), and in some cases, many different pieces comprise a single poem (for example, the three poems entitled "Brutalism," which obviously connect on some level, but on the surface are completely different; think of it as a poetic version of a Matthew Barney exhibition). And, as with most books of poetry, there are some that will pleasantly surprise, and others will not so pleasantly fall flat; rare is the poet who gets everything right. In this case, however, there are far more pleasant surprises.

"A sixteen-year-old staring down the barrel of a revolver may be said to resemble a sunflower, may be said to resemble the space between two magnets drawn irrevocably toward each other. Cool blued steel playing against her temple, pop song exploding from the lone transistor radio. Broken and shaking in the broomcloset all she could do was sing. To celebrate Melody, king of demons, over Violence, goddess of prosperity..." (--"Your Diamond Sutra," emphasis in original)

Perhaps "surprise" is not quite a strong enough word, but it'll have to do for the moment. This is good, good stuff, and more people should know about it.