He says to us: they don’t really do anything.
Then he says: But of course there is not a lot for them to do.
It is hard to resist a chapbook with a cow on the cover. It’s even harder when the cow is good-looking, standing in a green field, and staring straight at you. I like cows. Who doesn’t? Having worked on a dairy farm I have a sense of the cow - the one you milk, feed, let out, bring in. The Cows by Lydia Davis is not, however, about our active relationship with cows at all, or in other words humans are not in the picture. Good move. What Davis does is watch 3 cows from her kitchen window through the seasons and record her observations in spare precise lines of poetic prose. Or is it prose poetry? No matter.
Sarabande Books and Davis include 26 black and white photographs of the 3 cows in this chapbook, with the title page photo appropriately being a panoramic of 2 of the protagonists and (SPOILER ALERT!) the calf born on page 35. I wish more chapbooks did this.
The Cows is a meditation on bovine nothingness. And it’s relaxing.
Against the snow, in the distance, coming head-on this
way, separately, spaced far apart, they are like wide black strokes of a pen.
way, separately, spaced far apart, they are like wide black strokes of a pen.
Cows become isosceles triangles, cars of a train, a compass, teardrops, and then there is the choreography of the day – how they move, and how they don’t at all.
After staying with the others in a tight clump for some
time, one walks away by herself to the far corner of the
field: at this moment, she does seem to have a mind of her own.
Lydia Davis makes this all look effortless. There is no Lydia in her lines. It’s about the cows. It’s that simple. Moo.
time, one walks away by herself to the far corner of the
field: at this moment, she does seem to have a mind of her own.
Lydia Davis makes this all look effortless. There is no Lydia in her lines. It’s about the cows. It’s that simple. Moo.
