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Salvatore's Daughter: poems
autographed paperback
64 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 1995
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 29, 2016
Reading Salvatore’s Daughter is like being invited to a family reunion. Maryfrances Wagner lovingly shares snippets of life in an extensive Italian-American family. She manages to accomplish this without descending into mere sentimentality. The collection opens with a poem about her father’s hands, “the flat, grooved nails/ hands that fixed the doll’s arm, / mended Whisker’s ear, checked homework.” She reminisces about her family’s first house, of which “only pictures remain.”
Now a medical center closes us out
of the block where we ran in tidy yards,
(Neighborhood)
I am drawn to the poems about her mother and father’s deaths, and the reconfiguration of the family afterward. One poem, composed of couplets divided into 3 parts, is titled “The House.” This poem resonates so intensely; I feel as though I am reading my life, and isn’t that what the best poetry does-make the personal universal. In the first section, the father doesn’t want to move after his wife dies. In the second section, the speaker looks out the kitchen window, “alone with the house/ he left behind.” I have re-read the third section so many times my copy of the book opens automatically to page 22. A few quotes:
I come for mail,
come to check things,
to sit in kitchen sunlight,
to water African violets
I haven’t taken home.
Yesterday I packed
a dozen black sacks,
set them by the curb,
one heartload at a time.
In other poems, Wagner talks about Thanksgiving dinner without her parents. There are poems about lovers past and present (I took the key back; / you took the rum.), about people who appear in dreams (I Dream of the Wrong Men Days Before the Wedding), and about a trip to the Caymans (We slip out past where waves/ rocked us against coral,).
Now a medical center closes us out
of the block where we ran in tidy yards,
(Neighborhood)
I am drawn to the poems about her mother and father’s deaths, and the reconfiguration of the family afterward. One poem, composed of couplets divided into 3 parts, is titled “The House.” This poem resonates so intensely; I feel as though I am reading my life, and isn’t that what the best poetry does-make the personal universal. In the first section, the father doesn’t want to move after his wife dies. In the second section, the speaker looks out the kitchen window, “alone with the house/ he left behind.” I have re-read the third section so many times my copy of the book opens automatically to page 22. A few quotes:
I come for mail,
come to check things,
to sit in kitchen sunlight,
to water African violets
I haven’t taken home.
Yesterday I packed
a dozen black sacks,
set them by the curb,
one heartload at a time.
In other poems, Wagner talks about Thanksgiving dinner without her parents. There are poems about lovers past and present (I took the key back; / you took the rum.), about people who appear in dreams (I Dream of the Wrong Men Days Before the Wedding), and about a trip to the Caymans (We slip out past where waves/ rocked us against coral,).
Displaying 1 of 1 review