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The Pedestal Magazine > Archives > ISSUE THIRTY-THREE: Apr-Jun (06) > Reviews >Martina Newberry's Running Like a Woman With Her Hair on Fire...reviewed by JoSelle Vanderhooft

  
Running Like a Woman With Her Hair on Fire
Martina Newberry
Red Hen Press
ISBN Number: 1597090158

Reviewer: JoSelle Vanderhooft



When it comes to literature, confessional poetry is often that most difficult of children; when it´s good, it´s very, very good, but when it´s bad, it can be trite, boring and even, well, horrid. Martina Newberry´s latest collection Running Like a Woman With Her Hair on Fire is not only very, very good, it´s unique, startling and every bit as colorful as its lively patchwork cover (by artist Kristen Brix Jacobvitz). Newberry endows the book´s forty-four poems with a sorrow and anger that lurks in even the most innocent and peaceful moments, in children´s games and the bliss of a marital bed. While such emotions might easily come across as belligerence or even self-absorption in a poet of lesser talent, Newberry´s sorrow and rage–towards God, towards former lovers, even towards herself–always feels authentic and always hits close to the bone because of its unflinching honesty.

The rage with which Newberry writes is apparent in “The Orchard," the book´s second poem about the vicissitudes of childhood passion. In this piece, four children, “Cousin Lou, Cousin Pauline, Cousin Craig and me" explore an area behind the speaker´s Aunt´s house who warns them in advance not to “rile the bees." Once inside the orchard, youthful desires soon take over: Lou kisses Pauline and dares Craig to kiss the speaker (ostensibly Newberry herself), a dare he refuses. Instead, Craig and the speaker find

…a clear place to sit where
we could see Lou and Pauline pressing themselves
against each other mouths open, tongues working.
“They oughtn´t," I said, “it´s wrong." Cousin Craig
bit his lip and pulled my hair. “Don´t worry,"
he said, “it´s ok as long as it doesn´t
‘rile the bees.´"

When the adults call the children back from their play, their passion metamorphoses into a rage that none of them can properly explain.

…We picked up apricots,
as many as we could, began running,
throwing them everywhere, running with our hands
in the air, shouting and crying out
as if the sky were on fire. “We´re here!
We´re coming! We´re here!"

In this skillful and honest juxtaposition of rage, violence, and sex Newberry shows that passion is often a complex interplay between these strongest of human drives. This is a theme to which she repeatedly returns throughout the book, and a theme that appears prominently in “Politically Correct in America." In this poem, the speaker tells her husband about her recurring and very politically incorrect sexual fantasy–to be kidnapped by terrorists.

…I would
Fall in love with one of them, I said,
And commit terrible political
Acts for him like Patty Hearst who really
Did it all for love which she called “brainwashing."
My husband took it very personal.

So personal, in fact, that he leaves the speaker shortly after “the terrorist remark" for a woman with a degree in biology and “a bank account of four figures," leaving his wife and daughter to fend for themselves. In order to keep her gas and water running, the wife sleeps with a neighbor for money. Even though she attempts to respond to the situation with humor, she has difficulty hiding her anger and bitterness.

Yesterday, the man from the phone company
tried to get into my pants. I´ve forgotten
his name, but I had the phone turned off because
I can´t pay the bill and there was sure as hell
no chemistry between the telephone man
and me. My daughter says “What´s the difference?"
I wish I had my degree in biology
and a big bank balance. I wish I knew
how to get those things without maybe
fucking a banker or a few professors.
My paycheck doesn´t cover what two
paychecks did and, each time I hear a knock
at the door, I know that the terrorists
are ready for me.

Like many people who are acutely aware of life´s pain and unfairness, Newberry has an uneasy relationship with God and Christianity, a relationship which plays out through the apocalyptic imagery inherent in much of her work. On the one hand, her poems contain a deep longing for redemption, renewal, and divine guidance, a longing which is movingly apparent in poems like “Things I Thought of Today in the Shower," “Her Journey from the Clinic," and “Theology" (here reproduced in entirety):

The sliver of glass,
the sun so white, it thinks
itself a moon, this haze
that smells of a desert wind:
all these tell that
Fall is here.
They ask
“Are you ready for death?"
My mother said no,
and neither would I be.
I smiled at her “O," I said
“but you have not seen me
silent as stone, poised,
a tongue of fire over my head–
waiting for the Pentecost."

In other poems, life´s cruelty, the violence in the Bible, even God´s seeming absence from human affairs lead Newberry to speak of God coldly, and to wonder sometimes if he exists at all. In “James Dean´s Shadow," Newberry meditates on the ease with which everyday people seem to drift though life unnoticed, and attributes their lives of quiet desperation to a change in God´s character: “He notices less now." In “The Woman Who Read the Bible," she speaks of her mother´s obsession with the Bible and its inability to redeem her.

In the moving “Triptych," Newberry examines Christianity at work in three of its most visible forms: a Catholic street parade, a faith healer´s tent, and two people making love–saying “prayers of the midnight faithful." In the absence of salvation here on earth, she reasons, perhaps people can only rely on the imperfect love they have for one another.

Children vandalize each other´s bodies,
not loving until the damage is done,
not understanding that decay will
take over when affection goes to God.
Our abandonment by the saints is less
terrifying than was prophesied
and the Christ Jesus of the stone streets
stopped his ransom attempts years ago.
now he asks only that we return to Babylon
when our visits to Jerusalem are over.

Though much of Newberry´s poetry is centered on rage, misguided passion, and a tight-lipped despair over the human condition, it does have its gentler moments. These are all the more beautiful for the darkness that surrounds them. Dedicated to the poet´s cartographer husband Brian, the thoughtful and moving “Atlas" (reproduced below in entirety) is perhaps the best piece in the collection, if only because the reader knows the pain Newberry endured before achieving this quiet moment in bed next to her beloved.

You breathe in the night, slow and quiet
once for me and once for yourself then catch
your breath, hoarding it like silver. Your feet
are warm against my legs. In summer
the dark is too hot and close and there is
such stillness…spidery dreams that stretch over
us like an unfinished argument.
Outside it is too quiet. even
the crickets sweat and sound cranky. Cats tango
on our trash can lids-foreplay, then angry
lovemaking then more dancing while I
listen and laugh and sleep again on sheets
like relief maps and distant countries.
In this dark, I am a light to no one
but myself. Somewhere a nightmare finds me;
you wake me up to talk a little and
it´s almost as though a rainfall has begun.

Unlike some poetry collections which are best read piecemeal, Running Like A Woman With Her Hair on Fire is best read cover to striking cover. Its seventy pages make up a memoir of “a blown apart life" (as Newberry says in “In a Terrible Country") that is all the more beautiful because of its brokenness. This is a powerful, bold, and brave collection that will stay with the reader long after it is put aside.
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