THE ANDREW POEMS
by Shelly Wagner
Published by Texas Tech University Press, 1994
Hard Cover $16.50
Reviewed by Marie Jordan

"The Andrew Poems" is a book of poems about the life and death of a mother’s five-year old son. At the time I read it I was profoundly moved. I looked into my own mother’s heart and relished again the two gifts life has given me in my two daughters. "The Andrew Poems" was published in 1994 and in 1992 I had written a book called "Mothers and Daughters" about the mother-daughter relationship. It’s a book I wrote to aid in understanding of this highly complex relationship. I traveled and spoke to dozens of women’s groups, received letters from hundreds of mothers and daughters and began to hear a common heartbeat in a new way. It forced me to break through the bones of my life and find the voice to express this holy, terrible, sublime, painful, joyous relationship of mothers and daughters.

Giving birth to and raising a child, be it a daughter or a son, is perhaps the most life altering event we’ll experience short of a dramatic physical altercation or death. For me becoming a parent brought me the identity and purpose nothing else could. Love, romance, marriage are, of course, common pursuits to happiness and meaning, and I followed those paths. Career was supposed to be where life’s meaning resided, and the experience of success and recognized achievement a moral obligation. I confess, however, for me the entrance into the world of my two little girls is what I consider the real beginning of my life.

"The Andrew Poems" is a disturbing and beautiful book written by an accomplished poet about unbearable loss. Walter McDonald quotes Aristotle in his introduction who spoke of purging of troubling emotions, and asks if literature ought to be a tool for such catharsis. Perhaps this is one of the tasks of art and literature. McDonald says, "I believe that feeling such a terrible beauty deeply for a while is what we find in great stories and plays and poems."

If Aristotle was right, a drama like Wagner’s loss of her little boy by drowning will arouse our pity and also our terror. We will empathize, but also identify and dread with loathing that the grief before our eyes could happen to any one of us.

It is what we felt when we watched the horrible and ghastly events of September 11.

When I wrote "Mothers and Daughters" almost nine years ago, I wrote it with my girls, Christa and Liza, in mind. I was able to write the book with a sense of security and a place of family okayness. We were alive and well. We were coping with life and forging our way in the world as a family. I slept at night knowing my daughters were safe and well.

After September 11, too many parents are sleeping at night without their children nearby. Too many children are without their parents in the world. In today’s New York Times there’s a photo of dead soldiers lying in the dirt in Afghanistan, someone’s sons.

In Wagner’s poem, "I thirst," she writes:
I’d give anything
for a cup of the joy
my child gave me.
Never mind the daily bread.
Now I am creator
molding and remolding
every new and old love in my life
with prayer, edification,
risks and kisses
to recreate what I had with Andrew.
Fear of loss
and walls of self-protection
will kill me
long before a broken heart.
I pray,
let every death
break me so.

In the shadows of these poems I think of what John Irving said in a recent interview. He said his view of the world was intrinsically informed by having children and his fear for what happens to them.

The simple words, "I love you Mommy" or "Daddy" can’t be duplicated or imitated. Wagner’s poems reverberate with "Mommy loves you back. " Oh yes she does. Even when that child has gone.