Review of "the elephants are asking"

Saturday, January 18, 2020

Poem366: “the elephants are asking” by Karen Neuberg

the elephants are asking by Karen Neuberg, Glenview, Illinois: Glass Lyre Press, 2018

Unrelenting. That’s a good word to describe Karen Neuberg’s chapbook the elephants are asking, a collection that sounds a clear alarm about the environmental catastrophe that some refer to as “looming,” but that is clearly happening all around us.

The title poem lays the responsibility for addressing the issue squarely at the feet of the reader. It states,

the elephants are asking—

and the bees and the bats, the prairie dogs, the lemurs, the dolphins—one in six species—asking!

And the coral reefs, the rivers & oceans, the islands & shorelines—asking!

The poem goes through a longer list before nothing that the baby, with wiggling toes and plump arms, is asking. “Even God is asking,” Neuberg writes. With urgent work to be done, these animals and babies are asking us what we plan to do about the situation, and maybe why it exists.

The poem I liked most in the collection is called “Information,” and it starts with an epigraph by Gertrude Stein: “Everyone gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.” It’s a powerful indictment, I can say after noting that I have been on phone or internet this entire day as I write this. It’s no wonder the environment has gone to hell; its caretakers are asleep at the wheel. Writes Neuberg,

I see another spectacle blocking my view,

another fad slipping into my bed.

The cave walls are filled with conflicting shadows

demanding attention in urgent & dazzling tones.

How small respect has become. …

The poem points out that a barrage of information is “burying us beneath ourselves,” and perhaps there is such a thing as “TMI.”

Look, it’s not an optimistic collection, and the keening, desperate feeling of those who care about the world is summed up in “Occupy Today.” “I have seen falling / continue to increase its pace,” the poem states, and continues,

Some days I want only

my mother. Some days I want to wrap

my arms around the world. I see

the future falling at accelerating speed.

But there is one beautiful poem that does offer a glimmer of hope, and in fact it reminds me of the folk song “If I Had a Hammer”; written in an era of tremendous turmoil and struggle, that anthem acknowledges the power of one person to make a difference. So does “If all I have is a teaspoon,” located near the end of this chapbook:

If all I have is a teaspoon

and if there’s a calamity; say, a raging fire,

then I’ll carry my teaspoon

filled with water and I’ll pour it on

the raging fire and I’ll go back and get

more water and that’s what I’ll do …

The poem describes a small act—an act so small that it feels inconsequential—but any act is better than none at all, and there remains a hope that thousands or millions or even billions of others will add their own teaspoons, and together we might find salvation.

Review by Karen Craigo (Karen KC on FB) on her blog 

Better View of the Moon Poem 366 at

https://betterviewofthemoon.blogspot.com/

About Karen Craigo

Karen Craigo is the Poet Laureate of the State of Missouri. She is also the editor of The Marshfield Mail newspaper in Marshfield, Missouri, as well as the author of the poetry collections Passing Through Humansville (Sundress Publications, 2018) and No More Milk (Sundress Publications, 2016). She writes here regularly about the writer's spirit.

Would you like to submit a poetry book for essay consideration? Feel free to send a hard copy to Karen Craigo, 723 S. McCann Ave., Springfield MO 65804. Books should be from 2018 or later.

Review of PURSUIT by Ellen Pober Rittberg in Poetrybay's January 2020 Roundup

SEETHY SHIMMERY QUESTIONING CONFESSIONS

Pursuit, by Karen Neuberg (Kelsay Books, 2019)


Karen’s Neuberg’s book of poems Pursuit seethes simmers shimmies
professes analyzes questions confesses whispers and each poem
works its power in such a satisfying way. It’s mastery of craft
coupled with knowledge, insight, intensity and yes, a wisdom 

that age and intellect have conferred about the human mind 

and soul, and how she — and we — think, experience, live.


Such freshness of expression! Just a few examples — there are so many, how to choose? —


In her opening poem Aesthetics part 2, she begins with: “Amber plum over the soul”
and ends with, “let moon return to gong.”


or in Blue Whispers: “lake soul reflecting sky bone.”


Neuberg uses the natural world in such a fresh, invigorating way. In Companion,
she writes: “what pours from the soul/ of the world, those parts/ under stones
on the silver/ side leaf shows to rain, /the rain itself.” 

In her prose poem Couldn’t Be More she writes: “Even a flower couldn’t be more open.”


Not only is she especially adept at the short poem, she demonstrates equal
proficiency of the multi-part poem, the prose poem and erasure. In what seems to be
the logical conclusion to her erasure poem, Cache: the end note reads:
Erasure of my entire chapbook Myself Taking Stage


Her poetry has power not only in its bowl-you-over individual lines but in its unerring
ability to be satisfying wonderfully crafted wholes that end with a crescendo that affixes
the poem in the mind and soul.


Let there be no doubt that in her poetry, age has conferred wisdom. 

The concluding stanza of Bridges reads:
“Y of center span-latest years./How can we say our particular accumulation?
What can we say without it crumbling?” 

Or in How This Hour’s Raw Beauty Came to Enter Without Leave — what a great title!—
she writes: “Had I known before hand,/I still could not/have foreseen
what emptying/leaves room for.”


Need I say I highly recommend this?


--Ellen Pober Rittberg




see: https://www.facebook.com/notes/poetrybay/a-january-poetry-chapbook-round-up/2816521578398772/

Abbreviated Review of PURSUIT

With thanks to Gerald Schwartz. Full review is forthcoming.

PURSUIT
Karen Neuberg
Kelsay Press

To read the poems in this collection is to be instantly. Wondrously infected with perplexity. These poems make us look for what, inside language, we may have not yet necessarily known we were looking for. In each poem, precariously poised as Neuberg is between syntactical newness and each free act of the mind, she purges us of our anticipation of what the creative act is. Thus, as in the same manner as Susan Howe, Marie Ponsot and Barbara Guest and Martha Collins, poetries of vibrance, meditation and great music, Neuberg’s poetry reveals itself behind the multiple (and often embedded) levels that reality for her, from one poem to the next takes on. This is how we find a poet writing always amid the flash point at frontiers of both verbal experiment and perception.

The door to the endless (quoting in full):

Is closing! Must run!
Will I? Won’t I?
Something’s going
Quick enough to measure.

I rush to keep what’s left
Of what’s leaving.
* * *

Review of THE ELEPHANTS ARE ASKING

Huge thanks to Patricia Carragon for this review of "the elephants are asking" and to John Murphy, editor of The Lake, for publishing it. What a happy start to 2020. (There's also a link to the Glass Lyre website to purchase the book!)

Karen Neuberg, the elephants are asking, Glass Lyre Press, 2018. ISBN: 978-1-941783-43-6. 38pp. $12.00

The call to activism is apparent in the Age of Trump and in Karen Neuberg’s latest chapbook, the elephants are asking, from Glass Lyre Press. With the escalating destruction of the planet and wildlife, Neuberg’s poetry has taken a new direction. The rising oceans are dying in a sea of plastic and fossil fuel. Trophy killers smile for selfies. The air is unfit to breath. Rainforests make way for humans, sending the original inhabitants into extinction. Ice caps are melting, and the last polar bears and penguins will die in captivity. If bees won’t be around to pollinate, humankind will disappear, a prediction given by Albert Einstein.

In Part I, Neuberg introduces the ecological emergency and describes its heartbreaking effects. Her poem, “Evidence,” tells of the wisdom of the oceans accrued over time. However, time is running out for the oceans. She alerts the reader that observation and tears aren’t enough:

Evidence is crude

& wide. Watch & watch more.

No time for complacency. Weeping

is not sufficient.

Her message intensifies in “Climate Lag Time.” This poem is more than excerpts from reports. Neuberg strings them together, word by word, into a visual necklace, camouflaged as a noose—a warning for the human race to take heed:

Another oil spill/pipeline rupture

Coral reefs dying around the world

Red algae in the arctic snows

Bees and other flying insect populations declining worldwide

Nuclear and methane leaks

Hottest days on record . . .

Her warnings are also for our future generations. Her poem, “Perpetuity,” predicts what children might have to face a hundred years from now. The fish would not be told, nor would the birds be warned that the water would be radioactive. The children wouldn’t be able to imbibe milk. Fathers would weep, as mothers place masks on their children. The final words, scarier than science fiction:

 . . . Whoever remains

will hear the stories,

which will grow like cancers.

Whatever remains

will glow in the dark

bone by bone.

Her poem, “the elephants are asking—,” sums up what Neuberg means by “asking.”

The repetition of “asking” with exclamation marks, clearly expresses the urgency of the ecological crisis. From the elephants, bees, bats, dolphins, coral reefs, rivers, oceans, redwoods, rainforests, and more— “asking!” Even a baby’s toes, chubby arms, cheeks, and eyes are “asking!” The ending touches on a religious perspective: “. . . Asking! Even God is asking.”

In Part II, Neuberg focuses more on the consequences of climate change. She begins with “Old Game,” a poem about the last children on earth playing a game that was passed down from their parents. They pretend that they are animals—walk on all fours, jump, leap, snort, flap arms, and make animal-like sounds—recite each animal’s name. But this is not a happy game, because they are in mourning:

And with each name said,

a child raises an arm.

And this is the old game the children play.

And its name is Sorrow.

The poem, “If all I have is a teaspoon,” is perhaps the most ominous or hopeful piece in the book. Neuberg is trying to put out a raging inferno with a teaspoon of water. The ecological crisis is a wildfire that has gone global. She knows a teaspoon of water won’t halt or terminate the flames, but persistence is her goal:

unless I find a bucket to fill and pour,

or a power hose to flush it all away,

and I will never stop helping

the greening to return.

Karen Neuberg’s poems are touching and gut-wrenching, as well as compelling and educational. the elephants are asking is a call to activism. The environmental “fire” rages on, but watching the flames and crying isn’t going the solve climate change. Address the problems, even with a teaspoon filled with water. The author is asking!

 Patricia Carragon

To order this book click here

http://www.thelakepoetry.co.uk/reviews/neuberg/?fbclid=IwAR1nsu7kbxpYl0Zw0yyLCifFsZRNIOB2tgtP5Oz4Z3pBNsd_Fz1hFYA-B44