Herd

“Someone in Vermont’s gotta write poems about cows. Craftsbury poet Julia Shipley does it with economy and sometimes poignancy. It’s more accurate to say her chapbook Herd is about the farming life. Shipley, a Pennsylvania native, took a trajectory that’s less surprising these days than it once would have been: She got her MFA at Bennington College while working in barns, which she still does today. Herd combines lyrics with prose-poem accounts of daily chores. All are rich in the details no tourist sees, whether Shipley describes Black Angus cattle eating “cracked batches of flawed communion wafers” or how it feels rising before dawn to watch “the woodshaving, goosefeather moon rising out of a break in the black trees.” In the last poem included here, “After Snyder’s Axe Handles,” Shipley claims her place in the lineage of local poets:

And I see: Frost set a post
And Carruth set a post
And I will pound mine in
To continue the current of words through this diminishing country
By lifting a rock, a hammer, a pen
To mend”

— excerpted from Poetry Playlist a 2010 Seven Days poetry review by Margot Harrison.