Review of
Not Untrue & Not Unkind
By Saul Landau
On Martina Reisz Newberry's
Not Untrue & Not UnkindBy Saul Landau
In Not Untrue & Not Unkind Martina Reisz Newberry embodies
a compelling story telling style reminiscent of Robert Frost,
the enigmatic brilliance of Emily Dickinson and the working class
insights
of the great singer-poet John Prine.
When she writes "ON THE FORECLOSURE OF THE ONLY HOUSE I
EVER OWNED" she discovers that
"in love's great stink and stammer, the seasons don't matter"
In LOWER CASE LETTERS she takes us, far from the Elysian Fields
and into the weedy garden of poverty in America, but with humor
and practicality.
"What's wrong, says she
My head hurts says I.
When we hung up,
I balanced my checkbook."
The volume brings readers to mysterious and perilous emotional
places, where teenage girls experience their first sexual ambiguities
and then, as women, experience involuntary recall over an open
mango, like Marcel Proust's daydream provoked by a napkin in
the teacup.
"just now,
with the ocean in front of me,
I cut open my mango for lunch and
I could smell Vickie," (IN HER MOTHER'S BED VICKIE HILL)
The poems deal with precise memories of childhood, growing up
poor and frightened. Indeed, classical bards tended to find themselves,
as Wordsworth put it, "at one with Nature." In this
collection, Martina doesn't ally herself with Woody Allen ("I
am at two with Nature"), but takes us to atonal places,
banal but scary scenes that defy the harmony of Grecian Urns.
"
A crazy woman "told us radio dramas
on the telephone and rang off screaming
"Someone's at the door! He's got a gun! I'll call you later!"
Then she wouldn't -- maybe never again.
We blamed our own memories for her madness." From (THE STORIES
WE TOLD)
Reading her poems I also got dark flashes of Sylvia Plath,
"Don't look at me.
I am soaked to the knees in loneliness
and angrier than I am clean.
This time of year tears at me" (NO HAY BANDA)
and the vicious wit of Dorothy Parker.
"I began
to move like Esther Williams in a water ballet, like
a Piscean ballerina--selfish and keen and beautiful
in my reluctance. (WITH THE KOI)
One of her verses brought to mind John Prine's lines from Meulenberg
County, where the air smelled like snakes we shot with our pistols,
but empty -pop bottles is all we would kill.
Martina wrote in WORKING THE HOT LINE
"Movies lie, they don't show how
being afraid smells. Like sour milk. "
In the era when documentary
films have begun to fill movie theaters, it may also be possible
to see books of reality poems stocked on the shelves of the chain
stores. In desperate times, people need poems, to reassure them,
that they share their own emotions with others, including some
who can write them down in patterns and images that make them
beautiful and downright fun to read.
"The morning was sweet
like a lover, cold like one, too,
wrote Martina in DOWN
TO THE SEA IN SHIPS
Her volume of poems deserves attention - merits reading.
Running Like A Woman
With Her Hair on Fire 
by Martina Newberry
A review by David Fraser
Martina Newberry speaks to us of connections and disconnections,
relationships built and relationships broken, frozen moments,
childhood remembrances, the yearning for love and the pain of
loss. In the opening poem "Links" "three girls,
children really" are running, running as the title of the
collection suggests. The narrator asks which child she was and
were they all ready "for the difference contours of this
earth", and did you wish to be broken". In these questions
there is something a little frantic in the running, the not looking
back, and the questions. This poem sets this sense of something
fragile that pervades the collection as a whole. In "A Yellow
Truck' the "rideaway, rideaway" rhythm is set for the
narrator's escape, an escape she doesn't take. In "Gay Repartee"
the narrator is the trapped victim, an only child abused by a
family friend, battered and denigrated by a husband. She trudges
on apologizing "over and over/running like a woman with
her hair on fire." She asks why she keeps repeating such
subservient behavior. In "Politically Correct in America",
Martina talks of terrorists and being crazy and connects the
plight that betrayed women find themselves in when abandoned
to be that of the crazy world of the terrorist where desperate
measures are required for survival. We get the sense just as
in the running imagery of other poems that these victims need
to keep moving on, to keep on going regardless of the difficulties
that face them.
This sense of abandonment is reflected in other poems. In "John,
to the Seven Churches" the narrator is disembodied, a girl
on an ice flow, drifting away and she like Cassandra will tell
the truth, will "tell all who will listen/about the way
it used to be", but we wonder who is going to hear her as
she floats far out from the shore and who will bear witness.
Similarly in "A Child Over the Water" there is this
same sense of abandonment, of being somehow adrift within relationships,
out in a watery sea where passing boats pay no attention, where
no one is on deck to see any frantic calls for help. Martina
says, "These are the songs of ice-bound boats" and
"Still we shout and wave our shirts as flags." Relationships
are frozen in crisis and no one is there to rescue the lovers,
the children, abandoned and dancing.
In many poems there are captured moments, slices of time held
in precious memory. "The Orchard" starts with the memory
of a mother's and father's warning to "stay clean, be careful"
contrasted by an aunt's warning, "don't rile the bees".
The children's act of wandering into the trees as far as they
dared and stepping on the overripe fruit in bare feet conjures
up the Garden of Eden, both tempting and mysterious. It is here
that Craig and the narrator go deeper into the woods and there
is that moment on the verge of contact with its exhilaration,
not consummated but exciting, just on the brink of riling the
bees.
In "On The First Day of October" we begin with snapshots,
time frozen in moments tying a shoelace, riding a bicycle. The
poet stops to reflect on these simple things, perhaps happy remembrances
before life became more complicated, before things happened,
before a friend, or the narrator's other self became small through
cruel circumstance, before she became "artfully carved up".
In the last lines that invite a moment of healing over conversation
and a drink "too hot to drink" unfortunately there
is still a disconnection, a distancing, and a coldness. Winter
is coming and there is "just the smallest bit of ice/on
the car windshield".
In "Hearst Beach" a moment is caught on a walk along
a beach to an abandoned warehouse that was once vibrant with
men hard at work. The description presents a haunting sense of
change, aging and the passage of time. In "Things I Thought
of in the Shower" we get this contemplative mood set squarely
in the present. The thoughts are metaphysical. The narrator prefers
her shadow to her reflection, a sketch rather than a photograph,
a watercolor wash to a mirror image. In each there is a haziness,
something definitely hidden. She talks about " a second
chance for the world" but this can also relate to a deep
need for a second chance for people and their relationships.
"This moment the only moment…/this moment, this Now
that no one shares/with anyone is all we have." firmly roots
us in the present, roots the poet and her poem in her life. "If
it goes on sale, I'll buy this soap again" whimsically brings
up back to the mundane, the worldly everyday occurrence of washing
ourselves, with its symbolism of cleansing, rebirth and purification.
In "When You Saw Her, You Knew…" a haunting feeling
is captured in the moments of memory. The mythic femme fatale
of growing up whose "black eyes burned the boys to ash"
appears working in the office of the narrator's husband, and
the narrator knows that danger from her past and sees "the
way he smiled at her, saw the axe in his hand". This last
line tells it all, the loss, the anger, the hurt, and the truncation
of a relationship.
Relationships between individuals and relationships between a
person and the environment are strongly evident. Individuals
find ways of knowing themselves, of knowing heartbreak, of knowing
deceit and betrayal, of knowing in the Taoist sense the need
to be awake, to be deliberate and to get on with their lives.
Martina lyrically weaves a spider's web of lost love, pain, abandonment,
abuse, and deceit that creeps up on the reader with such lines
as "…I understood the sound/ blood makes chasing itself
down my straight/ white legs…" or "putting all
we knew together into your mouth" or "the failed crumbs
of a banquet coupling". This collection celebrates the raw
truth inherent in relationships. Life is not neat and tidy. Messy
things happen; pain and suffering are encountered as individuals
take risks, become vulnerable, and in the process there is energy,
a deliberate sense of being alive and carrying on.
Running Like A Woman With Her Hair on Fire is a lyrical enlightening
read full of candid observation, pathos and vitality. You will
inevitably pick this collection up time and again to revisit
and savor its messages and meaning.
After the Earthquake: Poems 1996-2006
by Djelloul Marbrook
A Restless Experimenter With
A Savvy Voice
(After the Earthquake, Poems 1996-2006, 159 pp, Xlibris, 2007)
In spite of what arriviste critics
tell us, good, even great writers
are lost in the cracks in every generation, and we must always
ask
ourselves if we have chosen to be a society too smug to indulge
such a
humble notion. It is for this reason alarming to see literary
agents,
editors and critics take refuge in the self-serving lie that
what
deserves to be published is published.
But as the means to publish expand
and new technologies evolve, the
critical apparatus is unable and unwilling to keep up. Many good
works
are ignored. The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley said of critics that
they
reflect the ignorance of the age. I find this amusingly harsh.
I owe
much to critics for directing me to worthy books. But the odor
of truth
lingers about Shelley's observation.
There are some writers in every
genre-I would extend this to the
plastic arts-who by nature touch so many raw nerves that even
when
editors and critics see merit in their work they decline the
work
because it has nicked them in some vulnerable place. With luck,
such
writers and artists may find the one advocate whose commitment
to
creativity surpasses his or her vulnerability to disturbing insights.
It's all very well to say that
editor after editor passed up Herman
Melville's Moby-Dick because the crazy pursuit of a whale wasn't
deemed
a suitable literary subject, but I suspect it was the profound
insights
that Melville sewed into the seams of his work that put off those
editors. Their supposed disinterest in a whale was their cover
story.
It would be a great shame, considering
these matters, if Martina Reisz
Newberry's poetry were to be underestimated because it hasn't
been
published by a prestigious press and noticed by The New York
Review of
Books. This protégé of the late Virginia Adair
is a restless
experimenter with a forthright demotic voice. Her poetic demeanor
invites you to think of the sort of person who, upon meeting,
you know
you're not going to be able to have a pleasantly vacuous
relationship;
it's going to be an engagement or nothing at all.
There is nothing of the deadly
competence and bland content one often
finds in poetry in our day. After the Earthquake (Poems 1996-2006),
her
latest work of 99 poems, is distinguished by her focus on finding
just
the right structure for each poem, each intent. For this reason,
it
isn't an easy book to read, because you can't settle into a
familiar
vehicle for the journey. But that isn't what a collection of
individual
poems is about. This isn't, after all, a narrative. It's more
like
a
briefing for a journey of discovery conducted by one who has
already
been halfway there.
I sometimes chuckled reading
After the Earthquake because the poems I
ought to have admired weren't the ones that I most liked. For
example, there are many poems more admirable in this book than
No. 79,
The Angry Affirmative, but I love the opening line:
Don't gloat.
You were just
my moment in the woods.
It has to be a woman saying it. Not a woman of the1960s, where
there
would have been a sticky embrace of free love, but a
woman talking coolly in the teeth of our paranoid 21st Century.
It may be that the polarization
of our society, brought on in no small
measure by sound-bite journalism, has found its way into the
tastemaking apparatus and that's why we so rarely see the kind
of
daring that took our breath away in Arthur Rimbaud's The Drunken
Boat. I entertained this thought as I reached Newberry's No.
60,
If Music Wasn't Enough:
President William McKinley's
favorite hymn was
Lead Kindly Light. Who knows why? But, if some light somewhere
is kind enough to lead, my ass will follow.
Savoring this tone, this profane
interiority, is like watching and
listening to an attractive young woman walking on a crowded street
talking to herself. An old woman, a bag lady perhaps, you would
grant
leave to behave this way, but the fact that a well groomed young
woman
is publicly having a conversation with herself unmindful of what
others
think haunts and disturbs you. Something is excitingly, profanely
out
of order here.
It has nothing to do with the
poet's actual age but rather with the
nature of the poetry, which is at once youthful and wise. But
not too
wise. Newberry doesn't suggest that she knows more than she's
saying. On the contrary, she tells you exactly what she doesn't
know.
Accordingly, we trust her.
But almost all of us have at
one time or another had a similar
conversation with ourselves, saying, Oh yeah, tell me where that
light
is, and I'll follow it. We don't think such conversations with
ourselves are poetry, but in fact they are its source. A good
poet
knows exactly how her inmost dialogue is conducted, how it sounds,
and
so she is very like the young woman walking down the street fully
engaged in the life of her own mind. We may choose to put her
down as
crazy, but in our hearts we know she's into herself, exactly
where you
have to be to mean what you say and say what you mean.
This is Newberry's accomplishment,
and it's all the more
considerable because we're not aware of the feat. We simply find
ourselves
unaccountably able to hear every word and every nuance of that
"mad" young woman's most revealing dialogue, and as
we trail along, trying
to be unobtrusive, we find ourselves falling in love with the
dialogue, if not the woman.