Goat Song: A Seasonal Life, A Short History of Herding, and the Art of Making Cheese, by Brad Kessler. Scribner: 2009. 239 pgs, $24.00, hardcover.

As someone who dreams of moving to a farm, I’ve thought a bit about the livestock I’d like to raise. Chickens, turkeys, a steer, and a few horses seem reasonable.

In all my musings, though, I’ve never thought about goats.

They’re petting-zoo critters, or odd pets kept by rather odd people.  And as far as functionality and sustainability, what do goats offer? Don’t they just climb ramps, eat weeds, and head-butt each other? 

Brad Kessler in Goat Song: A Seasonal Life, A Short History of Herding, and the Art of Making Cheese dispels just such misperceptions. More a quest than a memoir, the book traces Kessler’s transformation from Manhattan urbanite to small-scale Vermont dairy goat farmer and successful cheesemaker.

Along the way, Kessler illuminates the forgotten, unique place of goats in the history of language, economics, and religion – and proves that it is still possible to live off the rich, even spiritual, milk of goats.

Kessler crafts the language of the book as carefully as he does his cheeses; his literary heritage runs to writers in search of a natural paradise, including Thoreau and Annie Dillard (to whom the book is dedicated).

The result is a book alive with humanity and poetry, a synthesis of storytelling and song that makes for delicious, almost sinfully pleasurable reading.  Meditations on the benefits of wandering with animals alternate with descriptive passages like this Vermont landscape at snowfall:

          “The woods that morning looked rearranged. The birches bent in white arabesques, limbs scrolled in plaster casts. The last leaves on the beeches hung like metaled gold dusted with confectioner’s sugar. Every branch articulated against gray sky.”

Kessler organizes the book with a similar attention to detail. The sections follow the cycle of life, as Kessler and his wife follow the stages of their goats’ existence: Birth, Milk, Maturation, and Aging.

Birth aptly details spring, the first months of acquiring the goats, breeding them, and birthing kids; this section is the most readable – and humorous. When Kessler and his wife, the photographer Dona McAdams, take their first goat to be bred, the description of the event verges on hysterical; his uncertainty during the delivery of their first goat kid parallels that of a first-time father.

The second section, Milk, traces the first frustrating and rewarding summer of milking, with humans learning to milk and first-time mama goats learning to be milked. The summer also brings success in the form of Kessler’s first chevre:

           “The chevre was so delicious we closed our eyes when we ate it …  We ate the chevre, one cake after the other. The chives, the pepper. Then we unmolded a third and poured honey over the cake and ate it like a dessert, with spoons.”

Part three, Maturation, follows the bliss of summer and chevre with hardships of autumn. Parasites, coyotes, and frustrating FDA regulations temper the book’s idyllic earlier sections.

Yet Kessler manages to avoid foisting his lifestyle on his audience. 

Instead of guilting readers for a lack of interest in or ability to raise goats, Kessler invites his audience to experience the generosity of his goats and then make their own decisions. No more commitment is required; the visit is personal rather than political. (This is not to say that Kessler does not have strong feelings against large commercial dairies and FDA policy that requires pasteurization of all milk that is bought and sold. But his brief critiques focus on government and policy, rather than the daily choices of ordinary citizens.)

The fourth section, Aging, details Kessler’s journey to France where he visits cheesemakers and learns the art of making hard, aged cheese.The most contemplative of the sections, it intersperses the stages of making a hard goat cheese (a tomme) with ruminations on spirituality and writing.

Kessler writes that cheesemaking, like faith, takes patience and time; in Aging he asks the same of his readers. I, for one, was willing to give him that patience and time – in part because the first three sections of the book so moved me.

Finally, as someone who has read too many memoirs that try to encompass everything but the kitchen sink, I appreciated Kessler’s ability to focus on goats and leave the rest to the manure pile.

Goat Song doesn’t trifle with marital difficulties, mountain gossip, financial difficulties, or the pains of trying to write a book while also trying to grow and raise one’s own food.

Instead, Kessler ponders the necessities involved in raising goats – necessities many readers probably know about, but never give much thought.  One is the importance and intricacy of hay:  “[W]ithout hay you can’t keep hoofed animals. Without hay there’s not meat. No milk, no cheese. All flesh begins as grass.”

In the process of learning more about alfalfa and timothy and clover, the reader joins Kessler and his mountainside community as they help a neighbor bring in her hay just ahead of a thunderstorm. It’s just this kind of give and take between agricultural know-how and personal narrative that gives Goat Song its rhythm.

And as for me? Am I ready to plant my own hayfield and raise dairy goats? Not quite. I have to get the farm and some chickens first. Then, we’ll see about hoofed additions.

But now when I hear the word ‘goat,’ I think of Kessler’s “Lizzie … in her burnt orange mantle, Hannah in her golden raiment.”

While goats may not grace my hillside, Kessler’s book has a permanent place on my shelf. And on my next foray into a cheese shop, I can’t wait to try a tomme.