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.

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 enameled steamer on a black stove to Tibetan monks funneling glowing sand into a painting, create the backdrop for her quest to define identity.From “In Our Unexpected Future”:…for frocks outlast pillars. But feelingsoutlive frocks. The immaterial storms through,a force beyond years (a mere four since youwere nearly felled). It isn’t what happened that lasts.Not art, either, but the savory core. What’s felt.

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.