THE ANTHOLOGIST SINCE 1927 THE LITERARY AND FINE ARTS JOURNAL OF RUTGERS COLLEGE R E V I E W Manderley By Rebecca Wolff [2001] University of Illinois Press 84 pp. $12.95 Review by Erik Kennedy Rebecca Wolff is a product of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, which ought to say about everything about her credentials. Also, she is the founder and editor of her own literary magazine, Fence. This is her first book, selected for the National Poetry Series by Robert Pinsky. I try to think hard about a poet's first book, because, in all likelihood, the poet will continue in the same course until his books are as exciting and unpredictable as glaciers. Very, very few poets can transform themselves in mid-career. That said, I hope Wolff evolves; too much of Manderley is confused dream-stuff, like but unlike the confused, haunted manor house of Manderley in Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca. A number of the poems can only be explained as dreams or daydreams ("Chinatown, OH," "Flame On") and one poem, "I liked it so much," specifically cites "Freud's letters" (and presumably The Interpretation of Dreams) as the causus vivendi of the poem. I'm never sure what purpose the confusion is supposed to serve; one critic has written that the purpose is to "expose all feeling as rhetorical," but this is hardly convincing. It comes from the Any Nonsense Can Be Explained as a Dream school of poetry. We're fed the pointless poems of the trivial ("The Royal Begonia"), the poems of the scrambled but still recognizable ("Couched"), and the poems of the crabbed and perturbed ("Letters, Young and Old Poets"). A good deal of these are poems that are there, but barely there. Wolff writes best when she focuses her attention on a carefully defined subject and pokes around inside it, shining the (sometimes bright) lantern of her imagination into the dirty corners. The volume's best poems, such as "Broads Abroad: Elizabeth Bishop & Jane Bowles," "Out of Town," "Mom gets laid," and "Flame On," do this. "Broads Abroad" tells us convincingly of what it might be like to be an expatriate literary lesbian, to queer the ordinary person's expectations, and to escape seeing the "same faggots" always. "Out of Town" is probably best described as a homely variation on Stevens' poem "Metaphors of a Magnifico." In "Mom gets laid," Mom is very much like the twisted Barbie of Denise Duhamel's poems. She is, comically, anything and everything: smutty, kinky, fetishistic, deranged, etc. This mom might take a Hot Carl. These are poems that show why the little jar is better than the net: one catches only what one needs. It's always unsettling when a poet very properly describes his own work, especially if the description is unflattering: Ms Wolff says of her Manderley, "We will find, if not a language, a series of stabs at it."