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Red Silk: Poems
Red Silk by Missouri Poet Laureate Maryfrances Wagner is now back in print. Winner of the Thorpe Menn Award, Red Silk’ s subjects draw upon her Italian-American immigrant family, personal reverberations of the Vietnam War, and coming of age in the Midwest.
85 pages, Paperback
Published August 2, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 28, 2024
Maryfrances Wagner’s Red Silk
Not only does Maryfrances Wagner’s tight, detailed imagery, use of sound, and keen perceptions in Red Silk lead readers through four decades of U.S. history, it carries them through songs of innocence and experience from a female’s point-of-view. The initial section opens with a shy, young girl’s persona and follows her through “First Days” of school, where she “flushes” because she must repeat the pronunciation of her Italian last name, its “four vowels clogging the tongue” for her teacher, who stumbles with it. By the second section, the girl has become an adult who shares classroom experiences from a teacher’s point-of-view, including when she drives past the grade of a one student she lost when a car ran over her, and later, when she sits at the “Front of the Bus,” where her students “won’t see the thinning spot” in her hair. With its symbolism of passion and sacrifice. “Red Silk,” its “dye breaking ties,” opens the third section, comprising letters from her fiancé fighting the Viet Cong, their marriage, and its demise. And the final section displays a powerful, positive vision, but with a caveat in its last poem, “Depth Finder.” One of Wagner’s best, it warns lovers how we must sometimes hold back—monitor our emotions, lest we feel too much and lose it all, our hearts bleeding into a profusion of red silk.
BkMk Press, one of the nation’s top literary presses, has re-released this award-winning collection by Missouri’s new Poet Laureate, mainly because its language, rhythms, images, and themes remain as vital today as they were when it came out in 1999. It’s well worth re-reading—a second—and even third—time.
Note--I first read this collection several years ago after Mid-America Press released it. Although the beautiful, deep poems remain the same, the artwork and design has been updated in the BkMk Press edition.
—Lindsey Martin-Bowen
Author, CASHING CHECKS with Jim Morrison,
Where Water Meets the Rock,
CROSSING KANSAS with Jim Morrison
Not only does Maryfrances Wagner’s tight, detailed imagery, use of sound, and keen perceptions in Red Silk lead readers through four decades of U.S. history, it carries them through songs of innocence and experience from a female’s point-of-view. The initial section opens with a shy, young girl’s persona and follows her through “First Days” of school, where she “flushes” because she must repeat the pronunciation of her Italian last name, its “four vowels clogging the tongue” for her teacher, who stumbles with it. By the second section, the girl has become an adult who shares classroom experiences from a teacher’s point-of-view, including when she drives past the grade of a one student she lost when a car ran over her, and later, when she sits at the “Front of the Bus,” where her students “won’t see the thinning spot” in her hair. With its symbolism of passion and sacrifice. “Red Silk,” its “dye breaking ties,” opens the third section, comprising letters from her fiancé fighting the Viet Cong, their marriage, and its demise. And the final section displays a powerful, positive vision, but with a caveat in its last poem, “Depth Finder.” One of Wagner’s best, it warns lovers how we must sometimes hold back—monitor our emotions, lest we feel too much and lose it all, our hearts bleeding into a profusion of red silk.
BkMk Press, one of the nation’s top literary presses, has re-released this award-winning collection by Missouri’s new Poet Laureate, mainly because its language, rhythms, images, and themes remain as vital today as they were when it came out in 1999. It’s well worth re-reading—a second—and even third—time.
Note--I first read this collection several years ago after Mid-America Press released it. Although the beautiful, deep poems remain the same, the artwork and design has been updated in the BkMk Press edition.
—Lindsey Martin-Bowen
Author, CASHING CHECKS with Jim Morrison,
Where Water Meets the Rock,
CROSSING KANSAS with Jim Morrison
November 13, 2024
An interesting collection of poems about being an immigrant and memories from grade school and early marriage to someone with PTSD.
November 26, 2023
I have read this book--each of its poems--several times. There is no putting into my own words the effect these poems have on me. I just know that certain incidents in them, certain phrases, and certain word choices that surprised and delighted me float back up to the surface of my mind, and then I have to get the book back out and sit with these remarkable poems for a while.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews