Customer Reviews

Figment

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Figment is a good book of poems, but the smarmy, self-deprecating voice that rears its head every now and then is less ear-catching than pitiful. Priscilla Becker does this voice far better. We're back to the confessional mode with Figment, not out on the front guard, and that's fine. The word games Wolff toys with in the poem are fun, too, but one wishes they'd add up to a little more. There is promise here, but it's not realized because of a bad attitude by the speaker, it seems. The speaker(s) of these poems seem to be traumatized by language (O Language, why did you betray me?!), but only when the speaker glories in the language do the poems succeed. See Sylvia Plath. Plath rarely cut language's throat (as so often Wolff does): you'll see it in the fragmentation of the poems. But the poems are far better than most of the stuff you read in Fence. The best poems are in the first section. Or maybe I got tired of the attitude. Either way, it's worth checking out.

This is Rebecca Wolff's second collection. Her first, Manderlay, out only two years before this one, was chosen by Robert Pinsky for the National Poetry Series. Now Figment appears as winner of the Bernard Women Poets Prize in 2003. Crack this vibrant book anywhere and you know instantly why this young poet is way beyond the norm and why both her books have received such plaudits. Her cogent and dramatic juxtapositions lift from jarring image and ringing syllables. Her voice emerges in these poems from new-century concerns with an absolutely contemporary diction scalding in its accuracies. Read Figment and test language at its strongest.