Manderley: POEMS (National Poetry Series) [Hardcover]

Rebecca Wolff (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 7, 2001 | Series: 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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"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, '[p]lanting like a god/ in the afterglow of the newly minted.' ... Wolff here sets the house afire." -- Publishers Weekly "Selected by Robert Pinsky as one of the five volumes published in 2001 in the National Poetry Series. 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." -- The New York Review "The virtue of these poems is their speed: a restless, fourth-cup-of-coffee pacing, jumping from persona to persona and voice to voice... And anyone who doubts Wolff's capacity to be simply and screamingly funny must turn immediately to 'The Proverbial Handshake: The Sharon Olds Poem,' which should embarrass all young poets who dream of writing shameless parodies of their elders, but lack the gumption." -- Craig Arnold, Poetry "Manderley demonstrates in new ways poetry's old power to exhilarate while it cuts to the quick... Intelligent, purposeful as well as comic, wonderfully attentive to sound, Wolff uses her gift for gorgeous, poetic gab to conjure presences from the boundaries of language. This is a distinguished and distinctive first book." -- Robert Pinsky

Product Details

• Hardcover: 88 pages
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press (November 7, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0252026985
• ISBN-13: 978-0252026980
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,637,915 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars from Interim Magazine, by Catherine Wagner, January 29, 2002

By 

po-books "po-books" (Boise, ID USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Manderley: POEMS (National Poetry Series) (Paperback)

I've never seen writing that so accurately manifests the mind-games we play. Rebecca Wolff's poems are bold and ruthless; she stalks and pins down difficult subtleties of experience and displays them, still writhing, so that we can view their workings. It's a startling pleasure. Manderley's speaker is always ironically digging for something genuine, something pre-rhetorical, with an humorous, sad knowledge that she won't find it. Subtle layers of interaction and of naming become visible before us as she digs. She watches her own interactions from without and within, aware not only of what's felt, but of the way her observation and naming of the feeling colors the feeling, even predicts and creates it.

These poems expose all feeling as rhetorical, as at least partially created by our descriptions of it. Our rhetorical self-descriptions create discomfort, a sense of not fitting in or being completely honest and genuine. That discomfort is a source of despair and ironic amusement in the book. In Manderley, even the past is revealed as a mode of self-description. Stories we tell ourselves of the past both poison us and give us life. There are a number of magically eerie tales in the book that remind me of Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter" in their stark moral cynicism: one poem ends, "you must indeed follow children around,/endlessly, or they will kill themselves/at every opportunity."

The constant observation and meta-observation in the poems is very funny, an amusing mix of cocksure, pithy commentary and near-laments. Either mode is soon turned upon by the wary speaker, who lets nothing get by without "self-critique". For Wolff, irony isn't a negative, unproductive stance. It's more of a cheerful awareness that we are positioned by what we say, and that we are never comfortably or completely defined by it. Wolff's ironic politics is a dogged pursuit of accurate selfhood, which is identical to a correctly complex understanding of experience.

My favorite poem in the book, "Flame On", is both ars poetica and thesis about the way experience is structured:

Every time I approach this borrowed hearth I see the face
of the one I love...
It's so romantic, kneeling here, I wonder why
I don't just stay all day. His whole body,
riddled with inference, stretching out atop
the fevered flames...[I]n the back
of the brain is an installation;
a vision: a whole room
filled with observers-an audience-on site, glued
to the spectacle of me, returning once more, then again, to my spot
on the hearth, whence I throw a switch.
The light blazes on, electrified, conducive, evocative
motion of the mind. He just barely scratches the surface.

The mind as an auditorium observing the spectacle of oneself-it puts the problem of one's relationships, what's on stage, into wonderful perspective. It's as if a telescope through which I was observing my beloved was suddenly reversed and my own mind, the massive production-mechanism that constructed my beloved, came into view. (I'm distinguishing here between the mind-space the beloved occupies and the material reality of the person of the beloved. The former is the true beloved.) In a fine vengeance for the beloved's occupation of her mind, the beloved is roasted on the flames in which the speaker romantically saw his face. The speaker regains control of her psyche, not through vengeance, but through realizing the limited part the absent beloved plays in the theatre of her mind. This is self-description as salvation.

In one sense, our describing minds create our world beyond choice: "every character is you and you are too./We are a flock." But with Wolff's acknowledgement of the mind's power through language comes a challenge: we're free to re-invent ourselves and our world.

[I want to note that Rebecca Wolff is a friend I've known since graduate school. Also, Fence Books, the press associated with her magazine Fence, published my book last year. I accepted the commission to write this review because it gave me a chance to recommend Manderley, which is a wonderful book.]

9 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars juvenalia, October 10, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Manderley: POEMS (National Poetry Series) (Paperback)

When you publish a book & only your friends review it--friends whose books the author's published, no less-- can this be anything but a bad sign? As a 30 year old woman writing poems, I'm hungry for brave bold poems by contemporaries, but this book begs the question: must the poems of a juvenile culture be juvenile? America at its apex is a fat beast, self-absorbed & horribly self-conscious. Must our poems match? These poems scream LOOK AT ME ...like that one kid in class whose hand is ever raised in frantic waving but who, called on, has NOTHING TO SAY.

4 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Debut, July 15, 2002

By 

Robert B Strong (Denver, CO United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Manderley: POEMS (National Poetry Series) (Paperback)

REBECCA WOLFF is not writing just to make poetry; she is making poetry write as much as it can. The gateway that leads into her first book is the pointed arch of the gothic--in title, cover, epigraph, and opening poems. The gothic is not her agenda but a base-melody to riff from. By the third poem we learn ("Tunnel Visionary"): "my theorem runs: / if history is a tunnel, / timed ribs supporting a structure, / then it is collapsible." The reader, then, should expect "Unpinioned forms of simultaneity"; past and present, hard art and daily culture, are to be equally investigated. If we encounter the "spooky rhododendrons" of the gothic, we also have some honest interest in Our Bodies, Ourselves, some nonchalant acceptance both of "blah, blah, blah" and the mutability of meaning in language. Theory is never an end for Wolff and, refreshingly, it's no big deal. We have lives to live and art to make. The speakers in this book don't need footnotes to explain the complexity of self; for that, they have the multiple perceptions of their own lives.

Throughout Manderley we encounter many possible theorems and theses of art. Lines like "Imagination has never been a friend to me" or "Real content is mystery" or "Words being / the fracture of genesis." Even where these statements disagree, the poet is not contradicting herself. Manderley is a constant figuring-out that will overlook no possibility; Wolff has not made the common mistake of mistranslating the famous edict make it new as throw it all out. Her formidable intellect and reading are mustered to explore "The basic / subject that of experience in question." ("Broads Abroad: Elizabeth Bishop & Jane Bowles").

This question makes good poetry. "Spending the Day on a Sleeping Porch" is a gentle minor masterpiece. At once a lyric family-remembering and a private metaphysics, this four-stanza poem manages to hold the sentimental and apocalyptic of the family tree together in a way the rest of us can accomplish only by actually going home for Thanksgiving. But this piece does not simply demonstrate, it thinks, aware and careful with its own awareness. The sleeping porch "provides an elegant barrier, / tightly woven of vision: from inside, I can see, / but cannot be seen by, / the involuntary squadron / of my genealogy." In this repose, after alienated mom, after suicidal uncle, aunt's barbecue, and "the breeze much commented on," Wolff finishes the visit with a devastating sigh: "Here I have observed that / you must indeed follow children around, / endlessly, or they will kill themselves / at every opportunity."

The issue of irony in this book is important and subtle. How earnest can we take to be a speaker who announces: "It is all so base, no matter how we / elevate it to the level of this object / this subject"? The answer, I think, is actually easier than the question, if only because it is left up to the reader. Irony, for Wolff, is like every other fact of the world we live and write in: something we should neither ignore nor hammer into gimmick. Get over it, get on with it may be the productive message. This speaker challenges us to accept object as metaphor or vice-versa: "It is a red wax candle / between us on the table. Lurid, / in decay. Do you want to make something / of it?"

Moody undergraduate brooding on post-modern existentialism will not be tolerated here unless it actually does something for us. If what rises from the tumble-down of deconstruction will be more meaningful, require more faith, precisely because we can no longer lean on the deceptions of the past, then Manderley is a hopeful sign that a truly productive synthesis is emerging. As Wolff writes in the book's final poem, "A godhead / is lacking from our blueprint." The careful reader will realize, however, that resignation is far from Wolff's mind. She is simply realistic about the daily hard work left to be done by those who care about making art.

In "Everything Demystified," Wolff realizes the responsibilities that accompany "a critique of naïve and degraded notions of referentiality." It's easy fun to pick apart our aesthetic inheritance, but anyone who stops there is poetic dead weight:

Farewell O land of the festooned
armadillo, the albatross contumely, the torments
of July. One way of life is ended; it's a big
change to explain and it's hard not to be boring.

Wolff follows this stanza of farewell and warning with the poem "The Sun in Winter," a lovely etude of her (and its) own approach. The poem ends:

Oh, stay the sun
and make some meager homily
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.

Whether the issue at hand is art or pure perception, the solution appears to lie within the problem itself--a troubling, hopeful dilemma. This desire for beauty to "stay" and, in doing so, to give us a way to see it again, is what Manderley accomplishes.