The final poem in Red Silk is titled "Depth Finder". As her introduction to this volume of poetry suggests, this is not an ending, it is a beginning. However this volume of poetry is about the road to beginnings, especially when those beginnings seem so very illusive when we are submerged in the depths of living. This is a book of poetry that has been long awaited. It is about the "other" victims of the Viet Nam travesty. It is the story of those who waited at home for the returning soldiers, those who anticipated the return and suffered even greater anxiety when the loved one who left has returned a stranger. This is particularly the story of the wife, but it is also the story of the returning soldier who has suffered physical and mental wounds that never quite close, always just one thought or nightmare away. In brilliant, elegant, precise poetry, Maryfrances Wagner lets us visit the precious, frustrating, anxious moments of two lives that have been forever changed by the mental shrapnel that accompanied the physical shrapnel which wounded her husband. But the depth of this volume of poetry is not limited to the life changing, life threatening, experience of Viet Nam. The depth is found in the memories of family that rise above the experience and provide a foundation of strength that enables the author to move forward. The depth is found in the shared experiences of living and of teaching that are enhanced by the compassion and understanding that have been so necessary to ever move beyond the victimization of Viet Nam. That compassion has opened itself to embrace the lives of students who are seeking direction and understanding and that compassion provides the courage to meet the challenge of aging, as a teacher and as a human, and to share that process, openly with the world. This volume of poetry will alarm its readers. It will reinforce what the reader has already suspected about the strength necessary to prevail and grow beyond the most arrid of days. It will open windows into the readers' own experiences, and, in poetically precise unveiling, Red Silk will point to the depths and invite each reader to personally "glide into the cove" and "touch" their own depths. One cannot help but believe that the beginning poem, "New Starts", and the final poem, "Depth Finder", are interchangeable. Red Silk, through careful attention to the timelessness of experience, plants new direction for the author and the reader,sounds the depth of life, and then invites all of us to find our own depth. These poems are the treasure in that depth. Maryfrances Wagner has salvaged those treasures and shares them, one long bolt of red silk delivery waiting to be touched.