The Immigrants’ New Camera: A Family Collection by Maryfrances Wagner
Spartan Press, 2018
To read Maryfrances Wagner’s poems in The Immigrants’ New Camera: A Family Collection is to enter a world of vivid personal and generational experience. While the book journeys like an autobiographical memoir, poetic images reveal truths beyond objective details. We sense future trouble at a military wedding where the couple walks through “a saber arch / supported by wounded vets, our smiles / mirrored over and over on the sharp blades.”
Wisdom and humor interweave with recollections of family members. As Wagner’s Italian-born parents are changed by their new American home, they, in turn, effect changes to the American environment. In the poem titled “Missouri Fig Trees,” Salvatore, Wagner’s father, labors each spring to treat unwilling soil, nurtures the cuttings he’s transported across the Atlantic, blankets the young growth in winter, and eventually “loads baskets / throbbing with heavy-bellied figs.” Indeed, the fruits’ weight, texture, and taste come through deliciously to the reader.
The opening poem, “Uprooted,” sets the book’s theme: “Urban renewal bulldozed our first apartment…we will always look / for traces: cup handle, glass knob, pocked pan.” In the next set of poems we meet the zie—Italian immigrant aunts and uncles—an appendix provides a helpful glossary of Italian word translations. The many cugini (cousins) “circled the zie at reunions / to hear their stories, our plates heaped / with rigatoni, eggplant, olives, bread.” Life abounds in these stories, from original Italian village life, to steamship passage, Ellis Island, the men’s work at jobs and around the house, the women’s household skills and superstitions—a catalog of these told in “My Mother’s White Lies.”
Yet the poems go on to tell of harrowing bigotry growing up as a member of the only Italian family in her neighborhood. Simply narrated through clear cinematic details, these events stir the reader with empathy. And after a painful rejection, the speaker’s mother says, “What did you expect?”
Another powerful section deals with the extreme symptoms of physical and mental wounds of the Vietnam veteran she marries: “I bolted and chained the door, but…like splinters / of streetlight, leaking between curtains / you would find your way in…swollen and split-lipped.”
After, the poems journey back to family, final days of her parents’ lives, a touching memory of learning to knead bread by feel as mother and daughter punch dough together. When a parent dies, how is one to deal with artifacts of a life? Wagner understands the inseparable relationship of body with spirit. Her Aunt Mary’s failing body and mind in a nursing home are brought to life, giving directions for her funeral: “Make sure my hair gets dyed / and has pouf like I like it.” The final poems turn to nature, to cutting back and regrowth.
The Immigrants’ New Camera is a collection that reverberates within the reader long after the book is closed.
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Charlotte Mandel’s latest book of poetry from Kelsay Books is To Be the Daylight. Previous titles include two poem-novellas of feminist biblical revision. Her reviews appear in American Book Review and Poets Quarterly, among others.