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 times: 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 Dead: 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 confusion: 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 world: hardly ever has there been a poetry so needed in our times.

–Richard Jackson author of Broken Horizons and Out of Place.