The Conversation of Sheep is a book by, for, and about sheep. For those who live in the country sheep are strange punctuation marks in life, chewing insouciantly in the background while folk are born, work, live and die below the great and sundering sky. Some of these poems feature sheep as bucolic extras in the film of life, others delve deep into the secret nature and personalities of sheep themselves. Hugh McMillan is an award winning poet and Michael Robertson, whose photographs also populate this book, is a shepherd who lives in the same village.

From watching Mom shepherd, shear, spin, and knit, a little girl finds out just how her sweater is made.

When the sheep on a farm go on strike rather than having their warm coats sheared off, the other animals begin taking sides until, at last, a compromise can be reached.

Kids who love wicked humor will gobble up this tale of a trickster sheep and a comically gullible turkey. Ewww! Little Baa Baa is bored. So when Quirky Turkey comes along, the opportunity to make mischief is too good to resist. “What’s that?” asks Turkey, pointing at a suspicious something on the ground. “What’s what?” “That there.” “This here?” “Yes, that there.” “Oh, it’s just a pile of . . . smarty tablets.” “Ohhh. . .” After a well-sustained buildup evoking hilarity and disbelief, this kid-pleasing trickster tale will have readers both groaning and laughing out loud at the payoff.

Part coming-of-age story, part mystery, The Trouble with Goats and Sheep is a quirky and utterly charming debut about a community in need of absolution and two girls learning what it means to belong.

The renowned knitter shares her year-long adventure through America’s colorful, fascinating—and slowly disappearing—wool industry. Join Clara Parkes as she ventures across the country to meet the shepherds, dyers, and countless workers without whom our knitting needles would be empty, our mills idle, and our feet woefully cold. Along the way, she encounters a flock of Saxon Merino sheep in upstate New York, tours a scouring plant in Texas, visits a steamy Maine dyehouse, helps sort freshly shorn wool on a working farm, and learns how wool fleece is measured, baled, shipped, and turned into skeins. In pursuit of the perfect yarn, Parkes describes a brush with the dangers of opening a bale (they can explode), and her adventures from Maine to Wisconsin (“the most knitterly state”) and back again. By the end of the book, you’ll be ready to set aside the backyard chickens and add a flock of sheep instead.

Sheep are marginalised in literary criticism and in discussion of pastoral literature. This book brings an animal studies approach to poetry about sheep that allows for the agency of these sentient beings, that have been associated for humans over ten thousand years. This approach highlights the distinction between wild and domesticated species and the moral dilemma between the goals of animal welfare and those of saving species from extinction. Discussion of mostly contemporary poetry follows a new reading of works from the pastoral and georgic canon. Allowing for the sentience and sociality of this species makes it easier to imagine a natureculture within which to make kin across the species boundary. Reading poetry about sheep has the power to make new meanings as we try to adapt to an increasingly complex and problematic environment.