A detail from the cover of Farm, by Elisha Cooper
Take a farmer, another farmer, a boy and a girl." With these characteristically few but well chosen words, this beautiful and evocative picture book begins. The farm couple and their children are small figures on a white background, the essence of each created with a few economical stokes of pencil and watercolour.
On successive pages, a white farm house, two red barns, three great, green tractors, trucks, farmhands, not to mention farm animals and myriad cats are introduced.
"Put them all together," Elisha Cooper writes, "and you get … a farm."
And what a farm it is. The cluster of buildings and a tractor kicking up dust in a distant field are diminutive in comparison to the vast, flat prairie landscape upon which they sit. It's spring and the fields are dun-coloured - "bare dirt" - and, "Clouds race overhead, almost touching the fields below."
On the following pages, sometimes in a series of horizontal panels, Cooper paints the story of the farm's growing season. There is grandeur, or something close to it, in the painted landscape of green fields and billowing clouds, but the sights, sounds and smells of the farm will entrance: the two resplendent roosters, "deep in thought. Or so it seems"; the dust that covers everything, including the cats; the "bounce" of butterflies, and in the farm garden, the bees that, "zoom from bud to bud"; the cry of the unseen fox and the howling of Homer the dog; the heat of August "so steamy the horizon shimmers," and the yellow school buses that signal September, and school, and corn kernels rattling into the silo.