Maryfrances Wagner Writer

The Immigrants' New Camera

THE IMMIGRANTS' NEW CAMERA: A FAMILY COLLECTION (Spartan Press 2018) ISBN: 978-1-946642-70-7

Once again, poet Maryfrances Wagner has penned a collection of in-depth, well-crafted poems in The Immigrants' New Camera. Her forte remains the narrative poem that includes detailed depictions of interesting characters, and this collection will not disappoint her fans. First, I urge readers not to be misled by the title. Although the author's heritage contains immigrants, she is neither an immigrant, nor is this work a diatribe about the current political situation concerning immigrants. In fact, she wrote many of these poems, including those from her chapbook, Pouf (about her Aunt Mary, who expressed her wish, “I want people/to talk about how good I looked even dead”) long before the current national situation concerning immigrants escalated.  Nevertheless, the collection also contains a glossary of Italian words appearing intermittently throughout these poems. Further, some of the most moving poems, such as those from her childhood, reflect life “lessons” derived from Italian teachings of how to act.  Moreover, all these poems—including those focusing upon her immigrant relatives--display a mastery over the genre. Her use of rhythm and sound continue to delight readers. But the poems that touched me the most center around childhood memories, especially of her brother, and scenes from heated experiences with her former husband, a Viet Nam veteran And some of those childhood memories reveal some of the values of her immigrant elders, such as her Nonna. For instance in “Lesson,” which alludes to the motto, “Children should be seen, not heard,” she recreates images of memories with her grandmother:  I hide in Nonna's bedroom closet, past winter's nubby sweaters, past hem-torn drapes where she can't find me. I fold myself into a basket, a blanket over me, quiet, as the child combing pink doll hair, while Nonna kneels into prayers . . . (32)  Here, too, her imagery continues the “hiding” metaphor, as if the poet fears being caught voicing the “wrong words.” “Nonna taught me to push back/words that try for speech/from the throat's darkest basement” (32).

Likewise, the immigrant moré of children, especially the female children, “remaining silent” appears in “Learning to be Small,” which simultaneously reveals what may have helped the poet develop an imaginary world:  In my corner of our hallway, I take tea with Alice and Mad Hatter.  Here's my royal towel-cape, my small altar where I hear the prayer of Shhhhhh, where I wait to be spoken to, to be blessed with bonbons for being a quiet girl (34).·  More of the child persona's hidden activities appear in the poems about her brother. Ten years her elder, her brother was a teenager when the poet witnessed his actions. Thus, “My Brother's Room” reveals the images a seven-year-old girl focuses upon when snooping in his bedroom.  The Vargas playing cards lounged on his dresser where anyone could find them. By the time I was seven, I had combed his room daily for licorice, Juicy Fruit gum, and the unfamiliar. I read his pirate paperbacks, examined whatever he left out: emerald cuff links, ticket stubs, glass bowl of trinkets, a girl's earring. I wondered where he went every night in a clean shirt my mother pressed (24).  In ”Magic Feet,” Wagner reveals not only her brother's failings, but his ability to turn them around, at least with their mother:  When he failed chemistry, spent grocery money on comic books, broke his retainer again, my mother chased my brother Anthony around the table, yardstick, a foil plunging after him. He always joked her into a good laugh, and she never delivered a blow. Somehow they ended up dancing (26).  Several poems here appeared in previous Wagner collections, such as Red Silk's title poem. In “Red Silk,” the persona describes a gift her husband sent from overseas,” . . . five yards of red silk/woven with white patterned leaves” (78).

As in many of her poems, this exquisite poem, describes the beautiful silk, then turns it into a metaphor for the deterioration of a marriage—a decline caused by illness and injury resulting from the Viet Nam war. Likewise, “Wedding Night,” “First Month,” and especially “Ambush,” all from Red Silk, create metaphors of a world—and marriages—turned topsy-turvy by an unjust war.

“Wedding Night” alludes to that war: “I was a kink in this knot of wounded soldiers, /a phantom limb. Four would go back/to Fitzsimmons for skin

grafts, a new arm, /throat surgery, a rebuilt jaw” (80). Referring to the marriage between the persona and the soldier, “First Month” reminds the reader during that time, often there was “[n]o time for the flirt of eyes, /the clasp and nestle of limbs, the sizzle of foggy/kisses once savored on the old airport road.” (82).  And then, “Ambush” serves as an emblem of not only a marriage gone awry, but suggests a nation gone awry:  You returned after three days, your jacket a sketch of stains, your face gashed again. Silhouetted in the doorway, you rummaged through my purse, elbowed me away when I lunged for the strap, and shot out the door. I trailed in your wake. My lipstick rolled like a wasted shell . . . (85)  At first, I wondered why Wagner included these poems in this collection. Yes, they are excellent poems, some of her best. But how did they complement her more recent poems of immigrant families. After re-reading them, I realized that this nation has once more become as politically split as it was during the Vietnam era, a tragic wound in our Constitutional ideal of a righteous society. Today, it appears, we are witnessing a comparable wound. Upon close examination, Wagner's poems reveal that recurring political schism. Well-done, Maryfrances.  

     —Lindsey Martin-Bowen, author of

          Where Water Meets The Rock

Praise for The Immigtants' New Camera

Maryfrances Wagner describes her Italian-American family in such poignant, funny, vivid terms that you close the book wishing you could have sat around their table. At the same time, she makes it clear that their lives weren't simple, especially for children like her, who were discriminated against both in and out of school for no other reason than that they were seen as foreign. The only untruth in the book comes in the last poem when Ms. Wagner says that these days only “shadows settle into empty chairs.” She is mistaken because those chairs will never again be empty, not now. The immigrants in this family do have a new camera and it contains something better than film.  

     ⏤Lola Haskins – Desire Lines

The poems of Maryfrances Wagner stand with the best poetry of the immigrant experience, but they go further, even, than vivid depictions of Sicilian-American culture.· They touch the psyche of anyone who has set out into unknown territory, or felt dislocated and yet persevered with courage and much humor.· Of Nonna Maria and her daughters in a photo at Ellis Island, Wagner says, “They all wore the look / that comes before knowing, like iris breaking through snow.”· Lines such as those remind us, as Cummings said, “feeling is first.”· Family, here, can be read as a metaphor for aspiration, itself, for strength, and all that sparkles in this country.· Even in poems of the natural world, “The spin of leaves / opens a new path,” and presents moments of transcendence possible only through the spontaneous, surprising, and authentic language readers expect from Maryfrances Wagner.

     ⏤Robert Stewart, Working Class

In The Immigrants' New Camera: A Family Collection, Maryfrances Wagner eschews both nostalgia and regret, detouring from those obvious avenues in these poems featuring a host of colorful family members now gone and a look at what it is like to be perpetually caught in the liminal space between “Italian” and “American” by choosing instead a less traveled road, one she drives skillfully enough to allow her passengers somehow to co-exist in her loss and liminality ourselves.  We become like one of her uncles in “New Starts,” who savors a precious fig from a Midwestern tree, one which the poet has fashioned into a living symbol of the immigrant experience, since it has grown and flourished, through a combination of stubborn belief and faithful nurturing, in an unwelcoming climate where it was never meant to survive, delivering to the uncle, as to the reader of these poems, a “private communion of mixed blessings.”  

     ⏤Joe Benevento, Poetry Editor, Green Hills Literary Lantern

Reading The Immigrants' New Camera: A Family Collection is like sitting down to a large Italian meal. Maryfrances Wagner's images are seasoned with the immediacy of Kansas City's Little Italy, the family kitchen, the table with its stories, tender, painful, and humorous. ·The poet's narratives simmer in the richness of the Italian-American experience. Yet, as the best poems do, Wagner's poetry connects the reader to the universal, but with a hint of fresh basil and chopped tomatoes.

     ⏤Al Ortolani, author of On the Chicopee Spur

Maryfrances Wagner's poetic gift is one that captures still moments overlooked in the spinning whirl of life. In this sensory album of autobiographical poems, many new, but the majority collected from previous books over the years, melodious rhythms sing through the pages, never failing to enchant. Wagner writes of people she has loved as family her whole life with delicate, layered imagery that evokes a mid-century mix of beauty and humor.

     ⏤Catherine Anderson, author of Woman with a Gambling Mania

The Immigrants New Camera