The Salt Stones, by Helen Whybrow

Reviewed by Scott Chaskey

Published by Milkweed Editions, June 2025, pp. 256, $26.00

A good book often begins with a good sentence, a sentence that invites you in: “With my fingertips in the dark, I can feel a nose and two feet.” So Helen Whybrow begins her story of the seasons of a shepherd’s life, The Salt Stones, and the reader is engaged, not only throughout the first chapter (The Cord), but through to A Shepherd’s Mind, the epilogue of this poetic book. 

The first chapter is set in the barn at Knoll Farm, in Waitsfield, Vermont, Helen’s home place, with her family, for the last quarter century. It is Sunday, about 2 a.m. (she thinks), and for the last several hours she has been attending to Bluestem, an Icelandic ewe, who struggles to give birth to a pair of lambs. Blue is a fighter, and Helen’s favorite. Her husband Peter is away, and at bedtime she spoke with their 3-year-old daughter, Wren: “If you wake up in the night and I’m not in my bed, then look outside. If the barn lights are on, I’m out there, and you can come out. I’ll leave your boots by the door.” Sure enough, Wren appears in her dinosaur pajamas, having ventured along the snowy path, tentative, then relieved to find her mother, and she beds down on a hay bale. Helen returns to assist in a difficult birth, and so begins the story of a shepherd’s life…

The narrative of The Salt Stones — a book that earned the National Book Award in nonfiction — follows the life of a shepherd who is always in motion, yet it is also a contemplative book. Helen writes about so-called abstractions — feelings (like longing), intuitions, dreams — with the same precision as she writes about sheep, or grass, wood frogs, or blueberries. The balance between these two ways of being is the real strength of the book. So much to learn about sheep (!) — the Shepherd’s Glossary at the end of the text serves as a useful guide — and so much to learn about the intricacies of human-animal relationships. This is a lyrical book, but in a magical way, the lyricism seems to germinate out of the landscape: “Rising like islands above the chop of fog are other mountain ridges to the south and west, while forest and wind bring their song from the north.” For Helen, who has worked for years as a literary editor, the language of the land is as dear to her as the language of literature.

Each chapter begins with an epigraph from The Serpent of Stars, by Jean Giono, a story that is “a bridge between words — poetry — and the land,” Helen’s primal loves. (Each chapter also begins with a beautiful woodcut image by Wren). “To know is to be separate from, to love is to join,” are Giono’s words that preface a moving chapter in which Helen cares for and grieves for her dying mother.” 

Bill McKibben praises Helen as a “to-the-bone writer”, and she covers a lot of ground in this book, both in the fields of Knoll Farm and metaphorically, far beyond. In her own words, this is a book “of grace and joy, of death and risk, of endings and beginnings, of edges and the unknown, of letting go…” Her story of the land is also about being a daughter to a mother who is dying, and mother to a daughter who is leaving home. In a chapter pulsing with heart, Traces, she writes about our pathways through the physical world and through the ethereal; she leaves her mother with a wish that “her mind will travel into fields she has known, to the wide open, where the sheep go to rest when they are unafraid.”

In this book about caring and taking care, Helen, as farmer, is inspired to learn of the “pattern language” within the folds of a landscape; she is part of a lineage of pastoralists thousands of years old, and she is “learning that kind of fluency in the language of (her) own home ground.” She relates the design patterns inherent in structures to the practice of pastoralism, and she quotes from the architect Christopher Alexander: “The thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.”

We learn from Helen’s “shepherd’s mind” that “…this ancient, primal thing of caring for a flock is ultimately about human attachment.” To be human is to encounter birth and death (for a shepherd, so close!), and to glimpse the elemental and the unknowable. In a remarkable sentence, something for us all to contemplate, she writes: “I don’t want loss to upend me.”

Many readers of this journal will agree with Helen’s assessment that “the system of farming taught and practiced by our dominant culture fails us over and over again.” It is possible, she believes, to “make one’s own cosmology,” and that cosmology will become a guide on how to ride the waves of change, “to find our way toward healing ourselves, each other, and the land.” This is an elegant book, beautifully written — I encourage you to read it.