Manderley

"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