The Widow's Crayon Box: Poems
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- 13,99 €
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- 13,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
A book-length sequence of poems that dares to affirm the vast variety of emotional colors in loss and rejuvenation.
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 gradually
into that lake and disappeared. Not gone,
but so internalized you’re not next to me.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Peacock's affecting and confessional latest (after A Friend Sails in on a Poem) wrestles with the aftermath of her late husband's terminal cancer diagnosis. Throughout, she cultivates a landscape of emotional dichotomies, such as the feeling of "love-hate," which she experienced first while caring for her sick sister as a child and then again while caring for her husband. "I hated giving what I barely had away," she divulges, symbolizing her depleted psyche as being "like a stout cup, a thick glass, empty inside." Employing skillful symmetry, she begins a poem with the memory of budding teenage romance with her husband—"I yield to a turquoise sky, becoming young:/ a chartreuse vision of suburban lawns"—and ends it with his "death face, an abandoned clay quarry/ filled with memory water." She later returns to this imagery to contend with the torrential nature of grief: "Don't be sorry if you cannot cry/ in memory water. Just swim in it." Droll musings offer moments of necessary levity: "Is the soul hairless? Does it never secrete or flake?// Does it not have bunions?" This lyrical and vibrantly forthright volume reveals the iridescence of bereavement.
