Poetry about absence reflects mature growth

     Poems in Light Subtracts Itself, a new book by Maryfrances Wagner, gleam with the patina of experience and glow with a melancholy light.

     These works by the author of several previous collections (including Red Silk, which won the Thorpe Menn Book Award in 2000) move through and meditate on seasons of absence. The lead poem, “In a Season of Absence,” subtly introduces this theme. Here is an ample excerpt:

Now abandoned recipes wait

on the counter. Here is the absence

of cinnamon and sage, biscotti

and wine. Shadows settle

into empty chairs around this table

where no candlesticks soften

the room. Plants sent to hold us up

crowd this space. In the peace plant,

a cobra arches its hooded head.

The single gardenia lifts its odor

to everything unanswered.

     Readers will find surety in Wagner's voice and substance in her lines. The notion of light subtracting itself — a metaphor for death, as we learn in the second poem, “All the Time Running,” about a coyote hit by a car — appears often, binding and unifying the collection and suffusing much of the verse with a sense of loss. At times, in fact, as in the last line of “Brain Tumor,” all this “Darkness reaches its hand down our throats.”

     Yet Wagner also finds “fire in discovered darkness,” as she writes in “Stills,” a poem in praise of Rembrandt's “Nightwatch,” a painting that, with its deeply somber tones punctuated by brilliant flashes of color, serves beautifully as a visual counterpoint within this collection.

     In several pieces, Wagner touches on her Italian ancestry, which adds a layer of personal flavor and experiential depth to the book. In “The Zie Lie Down With the Facts,” for instance, she mourns the loss of heritage that inevitably occurs when relatives pass:

Now we gather around Rosie's headstone,

say she was the last to remember Easter biscotti

shaped like doves, Nonna's fresh mozzarella,

neighbors drinking whey as tonic.

It is the last stanza of “Attic,” however, that seems to best summarize this poet's modus operandi:

Every spring I climb into my attic, open

hat boxes, leaf through notebooks, untie

old war letters, poems my mother wrote.

I need to root through tins and trunks,

resurrect old purses, peer into dark corners.

I have to know what I can retrieve.

     Wagner's poems, characterized by a confident control of craft and brimming with memento mori, have been allowed time to ripen; not a line has been plucked too soon from the vine. Like a glass of fine wine, they go down easy and finish rich.

Kathleen Johnson, Kansas City Star

Praise for Light Subtracts Itself  by Maryfrances Wagner

As the title suggests, light subtracts itself, but nothing will diminish Maryfrances Wagner's new collection of poems.  It shines with communion and human empathy.  Whether the subject is a teen's tattoos, a brother's illness, or even an opossum, the poems honor their subjects with acute attention.  These poems will make you want to wake up.  If much current poetry relies on overly decorous word play, Maryfrances Wagner's new poems rely on depth of feeling and imagery.  Give us young Theda at the classroom's chalkboard, who “squeaked out another miss,” or, in another poem, the coyote, running from a dog and “losing ground each time he checks.”  There is not a stale or dishonest line in this book, only reasons for us to celebrate life made luminous.  

                         Robert Stewart

                         Editor of New Letters/BkMk Press

Maryfrances Wagner's poems can break my heart and mend it at the same time.  Light Subtracts Itself takes me by the hand to stunning moments with children, with family and feelings, the stuff of this world unfolding as natural and necessary as a flower—the loves and losses, the albums in the attic, the meals of ravioli—stories simple and splendid, lean and burning, romantic and healing.  The way “We mix things up when we tell/how it once was, someone saying/That's not it, eager to offer the true version” is how Maryfrances, bless her, gets all this into my heartbeat.  

                         Gary Gildner

                         Author of Cleaning a Rainbow

With an extraordinary eye for imagery and hard-earned knowledge of the human condition, Wagner gives us in Light Subtracts Itself poems that smolder with loss and yet remind us of the joy of being.  Your heart will sign on with these poems that explore subjects as diverse as death, early morning commutes, and the alchemy of light.  Glimmering with the physical things of the world, offering “a stepladder to the possible,”

Wagner's fifth collection takes us back to awe and wonder.

     Jo McDougall

                              Author of Dirt and Satisfied with Havoc     

Poems in Maryfrances Wagner's Light Subtracts Itself strike the eyes with the immediacy of sunlight. We enter complete, textured scenarios with her, learn stories of her brother, aunts, summer evenings--and then find the familiarity of our own lives. Wagner enlarges our possibilities. This book shows a mature writer, sure of her palette and brushstrokes.

                         Denise Low

                         Kansas Poet Laureate

In this book, the poetry of Maryfrances Wagner darkens and deepens with the grace and insight gained from bearing up under the loss of loved ones and the passing of years.  In a style that is accessible in the best sense of the word—straightforward, lucid, concrete—she coaxes a rich music out of her lines.  And though much of this book is elegiac in tone, resolution, hope, and sometimes wry humor also run through it.  But memory drives this collection, which smells of basil and tastes of Zia Rosie's “oozing cannoli dipped in cioccolato.”  As Wagner says in the poem “Attic”: “I need to root through tins and trunks,/resurrect old purses, peer into dark corners./I have to know what I can retrieve.”  Like the archeologist Howard Carter, she has retrieved “wonderful things.”

                         William Trowbridge

                         Author of The Packing House Contada

In Light Subtracts Itself, Maryfrances Wagner gives us lyrical, imagistic poetry that reveals a delicate and perceptive sensibility.  These poems rise above the ordinary to sail and sing.

                Maria Mazziotti Gillan

                 Director Creative Writing Program Bingham University—SUNY

                 Editor of Paterson Literary Review

“She understands that the very darkness that seeps in at the end and 'erases' the 'graphed code' of who we are, also 'widens our pupils,' enabling us to find our way without stumbling.”    

     Gloria Vando – Editor of Helicon Nine Editions