Manderley
POEMS
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Selected by Robert Pinsky as one of five volumes published in 2001 in the National Poetry Series
In the Manderley of Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier’s forbidding haven of mocking ghosts and secrets that refuse to remain buried, nothing is as it seems. So in this stunning debut collection by Rebecca Wolff, cities, partners, mothers, sisters, friends, and perfect strangers all disguise their true faces, while they who seek connection are “transported from one great gaping / hole in the fabric / of our knowledge to another.”
No passage is too dark, no garden too tangled for the troubled dreamer of Manderley. Wolff turns a quicksilver gaze on a fluid world where both the real and the imaginary are transfigured. Tempering steely candor with a sophisticated delight in wordplay, these poems turn on a dime from the sensual to the eerie, the resigned to the hopeful, the comforting to the shocking. Each poem weaves together layers of dream, remembrance, and fantasy, distilling from romantic excess a gritty, spare language of truth-telling and surprise
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chosen by Robert Pinsky for the National Poetry Series, Rebecca Wolff's Manderley tears mosses off the old manse of Du Maurier's haunted classic Rebecca, tosses them with a heady late 90s bravura ("Not intonation/ but affect"), and ends up, along with metaphorical "Day Laborers" of one poem, "anting like a god/ in the afterglow of the newly minted." In other arch eviscerations, "Mom," or the idea of her, "gets laid/ in all manner of positions," while "The Sun in Winter" bleaches out bad verse, "fixed on ginger-red wood siding/ to reflect into the eye/ a burnished spasm of glad/ tiding: antidote to venom of our imagery's/ declining." Founder and editor of the journal Fence, Wolff here sets the house afire. ( Nov. 26)
