Molly Peacock – författare

In 1772, upon the death of her second husband, Mary Delany arose from her grief, picked up a pair of scissors, and, at the age of seventy-two, created a new art form: mixed-media collage. Over the next decade, Mrs. Delany produced an astonishing 985 botanically correct, breathtaking cut-paper flowers, now housed in the British Museum and referred to as the Flora Delanica. As she tracks the extraordinary life of Delany-friend of George Frideric Handel and Jonathan Swift-internationally acclaimed poet Molly Peacock weaves in delicate parallels in her own life and, in doing so, creates a profound and beautiful examination of the nature of creativity and art. This gorgeously designed book, featuring thirty-five full-color illustrations, is to be devoured as voraciously as one of the court dinners it describes.

Using her trademark rhymes, characteristic humor, and daring sexual and psychological openness, Peacock's poems intertwine at least four types of original love: a narrative of meeting again and marrying in midlife; the tangled knot of mother/daughter love; a quest for the spiritual; and finally a vibrant love of the self, triumphantly recovered after childhood abuse.

In poems humorous and daring, forthright and wise, Molly Peacock returns in this collection to the landscape of North American poetry she has helped create—the investigation of love in all its manifestations. In the new poems, she takes us to the Land of the Shí, a world reached not by going but by staying.

Demonstrating once again her “luxuriantly sensual imagination” (Washington Post), Molly Peacock celebrates marriage and a two-track life with the man who became her husband.

When a psychoanalyst became a painter after surviving a stroke, her longtime patient, distinguished and beloved poet Molly Peacock, took up a unique task. The Analyst is a new, visceral, twenty-first century “in memoriam” of ambiguous loss in which Peacock brilliantly tells the story of a decades-long patient-therapist relationship that now reverses and continues to evolve. Peacock invigorates the notion of poetry as word-painting: A tapestry of images, from a red enamelled steamer on a black stove to Tibetan monks funneling glowing sand into a painting, create the backdrop for her quest to define identity.

After her husband’s death, Molly Peacock realized she was not living the received idea of a widow’s mauve existence but instead was experiencing life in all colors. These gorgeous poems—joyful, furious, mournful, bewildered, sexy, devastated, whimsical and above all, moving—composed in sonnet sequences and in open forms, designed in four movements (After, Before, When, and Afterglow)—illuminate both the role of the caregiver and the crystalline emotions one can experience after the death of a cherished partner. With her characteristic virtuosity, her fearless willingness to confront even the most difficult emotions, and always with buoyancy and zest, Peacock charts widowhood in the twenty-first century.From “Touched:”After you died, I felt you next to me,and over months you entered graduallyinto that lake and disappeared. Not gone,but so internalized you’re not next to me.

After her husband’s death, Molly Peacock realised she was not living the received idea of a widow’s mauve existence but instead was experiencing life in all colours. These gorgeous poems–joyful, furious, mournful, bewildered, sexy, devastated, whimsical and above all, moving–composed in sonnet sequences and in open forms, designed in four movements (After, Before, When and Afterglow)–illuminate both the role of the caregiver and the crystalline emotions one can experience after the death of a cherished partner. With her characteristic virtuosity, her fearless willingness to confront even the most difficult emotions, and always with buoyancy and zest, Peacock charts widowhood in the twenty-first century.From “Touched:”After you died, I felt you next to me,and over months you entered graduallyinto that lake and disappeared. Not gone,but so internalised you’re not next to me.

Mary Delany was seventy-two years old when she noticed a petal drop from a geranium. In a flash of inspiration, she picked up her scissors and cut out a paper replica of the petal, inventing the art of collage. It was the summer of 1772, in England. During the next ten years she completed nearly a thousand cut-paper botanicals (which she called mosaicks) so accurate that botanists still refer to them. Poet-biographer Molly Peacock uses close-ups of these brilliant collages in The Paper Garden to track the extraordinary life of Delany, friend of Swift, Handel, Hogarth, and even Queen Charlotte and King George III.How did this remarkable role model for late blooming manage it? After a disastrous teenage marriage to a drunken sixty-one-year-old squire, she took control of her own life, pursuing creative projects, spurning suitors, and gaining friends. At forty-three, she married Jonathan Swift''s friend Dr. Patrick Delany, and lived in Ireland in a true expression of midlife love. But after twenty-five years and a terrible lawsuit, her husband died. Sent into a netherland of mourning, Mrs. Delany was rescued by her friend, the fabulously wealthy Duchess of Portland. The Duchess introduced Delany to the botanical adventurers of the day and a bonanza of exotic plants from Captain Cook''s voyage, which became the inspiration for her art.Peacock herself first saw Mrs. Delany''s work more than twenty years before she wrote The Paper Garden, but "like a book you know is too old for you," she put the thought of the old woman away. She went on to marry and cherish the happiness of her own midlife, in a parallel to Mrs. Delany, and by chance rediscovered the mosaicks decades later. This encounter confronted the poet with her own aging and gave her-and her readers-a blueprint for late-life flexibility, creativity, and change.

In her latest collection Molly Peacock, one of Canada’s most beloved poets, tells the story of her longtime psychoanalyst who returned to painting after surviving a stroke. By translating techniques of visual art into language, The Analyst guides us through breathtaking settings and portraiture, searching for authenticity behind tapestries of illusion.