Not Just Us by Eleanor Berry

Readers of Eleanor Berry’s work will quickly recognize in this splendid new collection her fierce attention to the natural world. Marianne Moore said true poets create “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” and Berry meets that mark with her own precise, inventive language and playful wit. The word “empathy” never appears—no need. It’s there throughout, embodied in poems examining how we see the world and all its creatures, for as she reminds us: “the human world is not the world.” An abundance of animals inhabits this book: a hermit thrush with its “voice of longing,” an Arctic fox, jackdaws at Stonehenge, a turkey vulture with a “strikingly human” head, a sheep jaywalking through traffic on the interstate, the Great Barrier Reef rodent wiped out by rising sea levels. “How little we know what others inhabit this place we call ours,” Berry observes. Her metaphors startle and teach. One poem juxtaposes an old desk and a wounded antelope. In another, the speaker digs out a hydrangea done in by summer drought while a beloved dog lies gravely ill nearby. If such connections sound improbable, read the poems aloud, and they will strike home magically.

–Don Colburn, author of Purchase and As If Gravity Were a Theory

In this finely-crafted collection, Eleanor Berry shows us just how permeable is the delicate membrane between the human and non-human worlds. With deep empathy, Berry celebrates creatures both wild and domestic, extending her imagination even to explore the collective being of the coral polyp. Like the coral, she concludes, we all live by what lives around and within us―wisdom essential for these times.

–Pepper Trail, author of Cascade-Siskiyou: Poems, finalist for the Oregon Book Award in Poetry

Eleanor Berry’s poignant meditations on our kinship with animals are keenly observed and elegantly constructed. Encountering jackdaws nesting in the rocks of Stonehenge, a half-tamed eland escaped from her rural neighbor’s paddock, or a domestic sheep stopping all lanes of traffic on the Interstate, Berry sees sentient and purposeful creatures. Through her long-time relationships with her several alpacas, she explores the gift of animal companionship and humans’ responsibilities to animal others. Wild, domestic, or feral, lonely, dying, or exultant, these animals claim the right to their own personhood. In Berry’s meticulous and tough-minded poems, the entire world is animate, and every interaction is rife with intimacy.

–Charles Goodrich, author of Watering the Rhubarb and Weave Me a Crooked Basket