“Peacock is in peak form in these seductive poems that swing and twirl . . . valiant, trenchant, funny, and on point.”—Booklist 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.
Popular poet and author of the acclaimed memoir Paradise Piece by Piece, Molly Peacock tracks the vicissitudes of midlife marriage in her saucy, vulnerable, philosophical sixth collection, her first to be published in Canada. These lyrical, playful, moving poems focus on illuminating the territory of relationships, while always revolving around the deeper questions about how we love and how love affects the way we live. Published in the U.S. by W.W. Norton.
“Whatever the subject, rich music follows the tap of Molly Peacock’s baton.”—Washington Post When a psychoanalyst became a painter after surviving a stroke, her longtime patient, distinguished and beloved poet Molly Peacock, took up a unique task. Weaving an invigorating tapestry of images, Peacock’s poetry bears witness to a profound role reversal as its author looks back on a forty-year relationship with her one-time analyst, now friend.
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.
In this stunning collection of new poems, Mary Oliver returns to the imagery that has defined her life’s work, describing with wonder both the everyday and the unaffected beauty of nature. Herons, sparrows, owls, and kingfishers flit across the page in meditations on love, artistry, and impermanence. Whether considering a bird’s nest, the seeming patience of oak trees, or the artworks of Franz Marc, Oliver reminds us of the transformative power of attention and how much can be contained within the smallest moments. At its heart, Blue Horses asks what it means to truly belong to this world, to live in it attuned to all its changes. Humorous, gentle, and always honest, Oliver is a visionary of the natural world.
"Shades Of Blush" is a collection of sexually explicit poems written to get the juices flowing so to speak. Sort of a verbal foreplay if you will. Some of these works are sure to make you blush. The words and images they conjure up are sure to quicken your heart rate "as well as increase blood flow to certain areas of the body." Keep this handy in the bedroom and bring it along as a travel companion too. You can read a poem or two, sit back, close your eyes and relax into an erotic daydream. Or, share it with a friend, take turns reading to one another and see where things lead! You married couples will love it too! So take off some clothes, read a little, and remember, "In fantasy's, you can do anything!" SO ENJOY! Put a little spice back in your love life! Read one a day and improve your play!
This collection of poems and essays by both poets and scholars explores how John Donne’s writing has entered into the language, the imagination, and the navigation of erotic and spiritual desires and experiences of twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers. The chapters chart a winding path from a description of the Donne and Contemporary Poetry Project at Fordham University to an encounter with the Holy Sonnets to a set of modern holy sonnets and then through the work of a poet who used Donne’s Devotions on Emergent Occasions to chart his own dying. There are further poems on sickness and recovery, an essay on Donne and disease that brings in the work of an Australian poet, and several chapters of poems with various Donnean echoes. Of the final four chapters, one places Donne in relation to another poet and one to the Psalms, followed by two chapters on Donne’s speech figures and his poetics.
Scholars have long noted the strikingly visual aspects of Statius’ poetry. This book advances our understanding of how these visual aspects work through intertextual analysis. In the Thebaid, for instance, Statius repeatedly presents “visual narratives” in the form of linked descriptive (or ekphrastic) passages. These narratives are subject to multiple forms visual interpretation inflected by the intertextual background. Similarly, the Achilleid activates particularly Roman conceptions of masculinity through repeated evocations of Achilles’ blush. The Silvae offer a diversity of modes of viewing that evoke Roman conceptions of gender and class.
Shakespeare's Sonnets are among the most complex and beautiful poems ever written. Their exploration of love, praise, homo- and hetero-sexual desire is enacted in the richest, densest writing in English. And the first printed work to which Shakespeare's name was attached was the erotic narrative poem, Venus and Adonis, which developed a sumptuous vocabulary in which to explore love, praise of the beloved, sexual desire, and the power of rhetoric. That poem was so popular that most of Shakespeare's contemporaries thought of him as primarily a poet, rather than a playwright. Yet despite the power of Shakespeare's poems, and their foundational place within his oeuvre, modern readers have seldom been encouraged to engage with his non-dramatic works as a whole. This new edition explains how this state of affairs has arisen, and why it needs to be changed. The volume contains the complete Sonnets and poems with a full commentary. An extensive and lively introduction explores Shakespeare's poetic development, and shows how the poems relate to each other and to his dramatic works. The Sonnets are freshly interpreted, not as cryptic fragments of autobiography, but as works which ask their readers to think about relationships between lyric poems and the historical circumstances which may have given rise to them. The narrative poems Venus and Adonis and Lucrece are placed where they belong, at the origin of Shakespeare's thinking about what it means to desire and to be desired. The edition responds to the most recent scholarly work on the interpretation and dating of Shakespeare's poems and Sonnets. It also explores what the poems may have meant to their earliest readers. For this reason it also includes poems attributed to Shakespeare in the seventeenth century, as well as those printed under his name in The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599.