THE ANTHOLOGIST SINCE 1927 THE LITERARY AND FINE ARTS JOURNAL OF RUTGERS COLLEGE R E V I E W World's Tallest Disaster By Cate Marvin [2000] Sarabande 92 pp. $12.95 Review by Erik Kennedy Like Wolff's Manderley, Cate Marvin's book was also chosen by Robert Pinsky for a major prize, in this case the Kathryn A. Morton Prize. The difference in materials for prizes can be astonishing: Marvin's book is superior in nearly every way. Marvin evinces at the same time a practiced world-weariness and a ferocious longing to grasp onto life in the world, and to make it uniquely hers. She has had time to hone both attitudes; she is 32 and this is her first book. She has also had time to become a 'sexy poet,' even in the poems in this volume that are explicitly anti-sexual, like "On Parting," a raging elegy to a dead love, or seemingly un-sexual, like the obsessive-compulsive poem "I Live Where the Leaves Are Pointed," which is surprisingly concerned with the "leering mechanics" who glaze her window with saliva. She is a woman without having to be a feminist. Take as an example "Dear Petrarch," which responds to the great Italian's observation on "the sweet singing of virtuous and beautiful ladies" with the disturbing announcement that "When my mouth / opens it will scream, simply because the hole / / of it holds that sound." She bullies the male canon without throwing it out. Compare Marvin's skillful depiction of the old master to Billy Collins' in "Sonnet," a catalogue of sonnet-tropes, where Petrarch is just another cartoon-poet written about to make a point. The one is a cat-call, the other is a weak whistle. Like so many poets, highly self-conscious and evangelical about their own craft, Marvin writes a number of poems about poems. These are generally not so strong as the ones that tackle (and I do mean tackle) love, sex, drunkenness, etc.: the stuff of life. "Ekphrastic" and "Ocean Is a Word in This Poem" are mediocre efforts, and "Mortal," though rather better, is not as good as her best poems. A true exception to the tendency is the fine title poem, an absolutely bizarre and compelling write-as-you-go exercise describing a love-triangle, arson, lies, and a crumbling marriage. The last lines of this poem join all the elements together only to immolate them, and their destruction is joined with Marvin's own and, by extension, the destruction of the poem itself in the towering, exciting disaster. The poems, though, whatever disasters they simulate, couldn't be further from disasters themselves. Just as the title, World's Tallest Disaster, now reads like a prophecy since September (and the cover art, a flaming skyscraper, borders on the surreal), Marvin fancies herself as a brutal prophetess of modern love and poetry, perverted yokels and verbal curiosities. Her message is genuinely worthwhile and ought to be heard, as she richly says herself, and I second: "Much like a lighthouse / casts its warning to the morass of the sea, I simply ask / that you heed me."