The Cows by Lydia DavisSarabande Books, 2011

The front cover of this chapbook features a cow in a field, looking stolid and a little bit curious: ears wide apart and forward, one front hoof planted a little ahead of the other. The grass is green, and so are the trees behind it. The back cover is a continuation of the same picture, with another cow ambling off, away from the camera. There are black and white photos by Lydia Davis, Theo Cote, and Stephen Davis throughout the book; the titular cows appear alongside the text about them, and it works. This is a really great little book, worth reading and then re-reading. Davis’s writing is concrete and elegant and smart and engaging: this book is about looking at cows in a field, but it’s also just about looking, about paying attention, and then about piecing a scene together in words. I was enchanted from the first two sentences:

Each new day, when they come out from the far side of the barn, it is like the next act, or the start of an entirely new play.

They amble out from the far side of the barn with their rhythmic, graceful walk, and it is an occasion, like the start of a parade. (7)

The book is a series of vignettes, a scene of cows and another scene of cows and another scene of cows. Sometimes Davis’s writing is funny; sometimes it’s just matter-of-fact; throughout, it’s wonderfully precise. There are moments, which I love, where there’s both precision and abstraction, something very concrete but also making a leap, like: “When they all three stand bunched together in a far corner of the field by the woods, they form one dark irregular mass, with twelve legs” (11).