The Goats Have Taken Over The Barracks

by Andrew Najberg

In The Goats Have Taken Over the Barracks , his masterful first collection of poems, Andrew Najberg has created something just for our his poems, full of musical and imagaic tension, are of the earth and the heavens, of the mind and the quotidian, of God and science. Readers, in the sure hands of a mature and talented poet, are offered endless insights in precise language. These poems are full of dark delight, provoking and providing pleasure all at once. Open and follow this poet through the thirsty orchard. Listen when he tells you the "Draught's been too long for figs to plump. / Sometimes all you pick are wasps in skin." -Kathleen Driskell , Author Next Door to the Poems
Samuel Johnson described metaphysical poets as ones who yoked together disparate perspectives, and its modern version is Roethke's idea of a poem taking desperate leaps. In Andrew Najberg, we have an wonderful extension of those poetics. We begin so often in a domestic scene that can turn elegiac as his description of crows that turns out to be a meditation on death. Or the description of an autopsy that seems like an autopsy on life itself. In the hands of a less masterful poet, we would have here we have a unique and valuable vision of the world. Najberg's is a vision meant to hold together what seems like our crumbling hardly ever has there been a poetry so needed in our times. -Richard Jackson author o f Broken Horizons and Out of Place

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

Published March 26, 2021

About the author

Andrew Najberg is the co-editor-in-chief and co-owner of Aethon Wicked House and the author of The Mobius Door, Gollitok, The Neverborn Thief, Extinction Dream, and Eat the Light as well as the collections The Goats Have Taken Over the Barracks (poems), Fighting Fermi (poems) and In Those Fading Stars (short fiction). His work has appeared in nearly 100 magazines and websites, and he is the co-designer of the board game The Bad Side of Town.

Reviews

[Tea]

Ova knjiga mi već neko vrijeme stoji na polici, a danas sam ju napokon pročitala.

Autor piše o anegdotama iz Zadra i s otoka Ista te sam zato mislila da će mi sadržaj biti blizak srcu. Knjigu sam dobila od daljnje rodice baš na katamaranu po povratku s Ista. Autor mi spada pod neki daljnji rod. Zanimljivo je čitati o nečemu poznatom iz perspektive osobe s kojom dijelim krvnu vezu, iako ga nikad nisam osobno upoznala.

Najviše su me se dojmili dijelovi u kojima autor progovara o boli, gubitku i smrti. Osjeća se iskrenost i duboka introspekcija u tim trenucima. Knjizi dajem tri zvjezdice jer su mi pjesme ponekad djelovale repetitivno s ritmom koji me podsjećao više na nabrajanje nego na poetski tok.

[C. Kiefer]

First, this is free verse poetry. This means it has no clear structure, rhyme or anything else which would classify this as classical poetry. Also, the structure of individual poems can vary greatly from each other.

The overarching theme is loss, death and grief.

This writing has a deeply personal component in which the author seems to contemplate his own mortality, at one point ("Isn’t this grand we said? Doesn’t this help you with your grief, Mrs. Najberg?") coupled with him wondering how the scientific method is going to help her and how absurd it all is in the end.
One can sense the author's intentions and underlying motivation in his writing, how he dealt with grief, his thoughts about death, and the influence of his personal life in his philosophical musings and lamentations.

I assume that this book is divided into four parts to draw similarities to the four stations of grief. Yet despite this, knowing it is a collection and seeing as a large part of the individual poems (not all) were previously published in other publications, I can only assume that the collection was divided into four parts as an afterthought.
I thought some structural component would unite the collection, but I couldn't see it. I can see the theme spanning through the collection, though.

My personal favourite are "Grandfather" (see above) and "A murder of eels", which paints a very vivid picture.

[Chad Hensley]

Indeed, there are goats, along with many other things. This collection vacillates between the mundane and bizarre, offering something for everyone.

Some of my favorite lines from the collection:
"We all forgot the Braille of memory when our hearts began to beat."

"Every second of every day the universe dies a little more, a light greater than any star diminishing."

"This type of place knows how much deeper the land than wide, that the dust of a parent’s bones
should cradle their child’s"

"I promise
I will set the receiver off the hook
so the darkness can speak
to the no one on the other end"

"We spin naked in cool, radiate rings.
Reap the softness from each other’s hair"

If you are a fan of modern poetry based on the world that we live in, I believe you will find something to enjoy in this collection.