Goats & Those Who Live By Them

Greg Bernhardt's Goats & Those Who Live By Them is an homage to the special nexus between goats and humans as observed by the poet's twenty-year life on a small goat farm in Vermont. The voices of the poems speak with an ordinary tone, reflecting the everyday moments of life through the view of the animals, the people, the children, the poet's wife who tends to the herd, and even the land. Goats & Those Who Live By Them shows two worlds living side by side, the humanscape and the goat world. It tells the story of living in each simultaneously, passing from one to the other each day, sometimes dwelling in one more than the other. The various goats of Bernhardt's farm turn out to be not just companions to "those who live by them," but the path makers, granting "those" a unique perspective, an unfeigned appreciation of nature and life and our place in it.