THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, March 31, 1995 TAG: 9503290161
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 12 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ERIC FEBER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 95 lines
Even now, 10 years after the death of her youngest son, Andrew, Shelly Jones Wagner's pain is not far from the surface.
Recently, the sight of an automobile bumper sticker reading, ``Have You Hugged Your Child Today?'' was all it took to flood her with vivid memories of Andrew's death on July 26, 1984.
It was a tragedy that forever changed her life and the lives of her family and friends. The pain and overwhelming emotions she felt - and still feels - was finally turned into creative energy that enabled her to compose ``The Andrew Poems,'' 47 vignettes chronicling the death of her son and the emotions and feelings they created in her and her loved ones.
Wagner was recently at Norfolk Christian High School reading several of her poems to a student assembly.
``When I read `The Gold Sofa,' the first poem I ever wrote, one of the students left sobbing,'' Wagner said. ``I later learned her father died in September. When you're raw and emotionally wounded you need to talk to and see someone else who is also in that raw state.''
Wagner will read her raw and emotionally charged poems at 2:30 p.m. Sunday at the Chesapeake Central Library, 298 Cedar Road.
She wants the audience to realize that loss is universal. That the loss of a child is permanent and the emotion is deep and strong.
Her book, published in January 1994 and now in its third printing, is the winner of the Texas Tech University Press First Book Award.
In the book's preface, Walter MacDonald, Texas Tech University Press editor and judge of the First Book Award series, writes, ``What an awesome and wonderful book this is, a sustained and poignant cycle of poems I doubt I'll ever find equaled.''
In talking about the collection and how it came to be, Wagner said, ``I learned about myself when I wrote those poems. It's like the self-examined life. I think I was doing that anyway with every part of Andrew's death. The poems were just another way of exploring what that loss was going to do to me and my family and our future.''
After Andrew's death, Wagner lost interest in her interior decorator job. Life was a struggle, full of pain, crying and many, many downs, she said.
``I had read all of the books dealing with the death of children, grief and the emotions felt,'' she said. ``But they didn't seem to help.''
Her poetic descent and ascent into her own grief, emotions and eventual affirmation of life didn't even start until five years after Andrew's death, when she was visiting her brother, Richard Jones, poet-in-residence at DePaul University and editor of Poetry East magazine.
``I had never written poetry before,'' said Wagner, who graduated from ODU in 1969 with a bachelor's degree in English. ``I told my brother that none of the books I read held my pain. He then told me, `While I'm at work, write me a poem.' It came right out on the page, like a stream. That first poem was `The Gold Sofa.' ''
Wagner said her brother challenged her to write more.
``He knew I had this good poetry in me,'' Wagner said.
After writing that first poem, Wagner began taking a creative writing class at ODU taught by visiting poet Ruth Stone. Wagner said the two became friends and, like her brother, Stone also encouraged her to write, even if it meant pain.
``Ruth began to work with me,'' Wagner said. ``But halfway through my work I told her, `I cannot write it anymore. It's painful, and I'm sick of it all.' She just looked at me and simply said, `But you must!' ''
Stone encouraged her to send out her work for publications. Soon they began to appear in magazines like Poetry East, American Poetry Review and various ODU publications.
``It was exhilarating to see these published on page,'' she said.
After McDonald spotted Wagner's work in these publications, he contacted her, asking for an entire book of poems. She had only about a half book of material ready, so in the summer of '92 she rolled up her sleeves and set down to write, finally composing more than 20 in a three-month period.
``It was emotionally draining,'' she said of the experience. ``I took all of the ones I had already written and combined them with the ones I composed that summer and choreographed them like a novel. No poem got into the book unless it clobbered me emotionally.''
Finally, Wagner received what she thought was the best reaction to the book. A reaction that made all of her work and pain worthwhile.
``My oldest son Thomas was reading the galley proofs of the poems,'' Wagner said. ``After he read them all he told me, `Mom, the whole world needs a book like this.' '' ILLUSTRATION: Shelly Wagner's ``The Andrew Poems'' chronicles the death of her
son.
WHO: Shelly Jones Wagner
WHAT: Wagner will read from ``The Andrew Poems,'' published by
Texas Tech University Press.
WHERE: Chesapeake Central Library, 298 Cedar Road.
WHEN: Sunday, 2:30 p.m.
COST: Free. Call 547-6591 for more information. Seating will be
limited.
by CNB