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The Second Blush: Poems
Acclaimed poet Molly Peacock tracks the vicissitudes of midlife marriage in her saucy, vulnerable, philosophical sixth collection. 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. As teenage sweethearts separated by other obligations, they found each other again at midlife. The piquant, sonnet-based poems take as their starting point her husband's survival from a life-threatening disease, addressing the contradictory ideas of planning for the future along with the urgency to make the present brilliantly alive. Three sections of the book portray moments in the marriage―domestic glimpses―but all the poems revolve around the deeper issue of how we love and how love affects the way we live.
- GenresPoetry
80 pages, Hardcover
First published June 2, 2008
2 people are currently reading
55 people want to read
About the author
Molly Peacock
48 books128 followersMolly Peacock is a widely anthologized poet, biographer, memoirist, and New Yorker transplanted to Toronto, her adopted city.
Her newest biography is FLOWER DIARY: IN WHICH MARY HIESTER REID PAINTS, TRAVELS, MARRIES & OPENS A DOOR (ECW Press). "In prose as subtle and enchanting as Mary Hiester Reid's own brushstrokes, FLOWER DIARY paints a compelling portrait of a talented and unjustly neglected paiter. Molly Peacock is unfailingly sensitive and intelligent, and at times deeply moving, as she shows how, despite the shade of domestic life and the unfavorable climate of the times, MHR brought forth her bright blossoms," writes Ross King.
Molly's latest book of poems is THE ANALYST (W.W. Norton & Company) where she takes up a unique task: telling the story of her psychotherapist who survived a stroke by reconnecting with her girlhood talent for painting. Peacock’s latest work of nonfiction is THE PAPER GARDEN: MRS. DELANY BEGINS HER LIFE'S WORK AT 72, a Canadian bestseller, named a Book of the Year by The Economist, The Globe and Mail, The Irish Times, The London Evening Standard and Booklist, published in the US, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. “Like her glorious and multilayered collages, Delany is so vivid a character she almost jumps from the page,” Andrea Wulf wrote in The New York Times Book Review.
Molly ventured into short fiction with ALPHABETIQUE: 26 CHARACTERISTIC FICTIONS magically illustrated by Kara Kosaka, published by McClelland & Stewart. Her memoir, PARADISE, PIECE BY PIECE, about her choice not to have children, is now an e-book.
Molly is featured in MY SO-CALLED SELFISH LIFE, a documentary about choosing to be childfree by Trixifilms, and she is one of the subjects of Renee McCormick’s documentary, A LIFE WITHOUT CONVENTION, https://vimeo.com/178503153. As a New Yorker, she helped create Poetry in Motion on the subways and buses; in Toronto she founded THE BEST CANADIAN POETRY IN ENGLISH. Molly is the widow of Michael Groden, a James Joyce scholar.
Her newest biography is FLOWER DIARY: IN WHICH MARY HIESTER REID PAINTS, TRAVELS, MARRIES & OPENS A DOOR (ECW Press). "In prose as subtle and enchanting as Mary Hiester Reid's own brushstrokes, FLOWER DIARY paints a compelling portrait of a talented and unjustly neglected paiter. Molly Peacock is unfailingly sensitive and intelligent, and at times deeply moving, as she shows how, despite the shade of domestic life and the unfavorable climate of the times, MHR brought forth her bright blossoms," writes Ross King.
Molly's latest book of poems is THE ANALYST (W.W. Norton & Company) where she takes up a unique task: telling the story of her psychotherapist who survived a stroke by reconnecting with her girlhood talent for painting. Peacock’s latest work of nonfiction is THE PAPER GARDEN: MRS. DELANY BEGINS HER LIFE'S WORK AT 72, a Canadian bestseller, named a Book of the Year by The Economist, The Globe and Mail, The Irish Times, The London Evening Standard and Booklist, published in the US, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. “Like her glorious and multilayered collages, Delany is so vivid a character she almost jumps from the page,” Andrea Wulf wrote in The New York Times Book Review.
Molly ventured into short fiction with ALPHABETIQUE: 26 CHARACTERISTIC FICTIONS magically illustrated by Kara Kosaka, published by McClelland & Stewart. Her memoir, PARADISE, PIECE BY PIECE, about her choice not to have children, is now an e-book.
Molly is featured in MY SO-CALLED SELFISH LIFE, a documentary about choosing to be childfree by Trixifilms, and she is one of the subjects of Renee McCormick’s documentary, A LIFE WITHOUT CONVENTION, https://vimeo.com/178503153. As a New Yorker, she helped create Poetry in Motion on the subways and buses; in Toronto she founded THE BEST CANADIAN POETRY IN ENGLISH. Molly is the widow of Michael Groden, a James Joyce scholar.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
February 15, 2009
Molly Peacock, The Second Blush (in The Brooklyn Rail)
(W.W. Norton, 2008)
Begin again. Be true. Hold on and hold dear. That’s what The Second Blush is about. Molly Peacock dedicates this one to her husband. The two teenage sweethearts were swept apart by circumstances only to rejoin in midlife.
Based on the domestic, the poems also glisten with mythic traces. Rain bejewels a leaf. Broken dishes, housecats and painted toes share the pages with a masturbating gargoyle and the “throne of fear.”
Peacock’s metaphysical deliberations commence with a precise thought. Objects like a good luck charm or events like an argument on Pearse Street in Dublin serve as triggers. Some poems are modern sonnets with rhyming or slant rhyming couplets at the end. The metaphors are crisply succinct. In “Old Friends” cursive writing is a “pleasure…/a measure of lines made by our lives...”
Peacock is not all over the place. Some poems begin where others leave off. She draws down on nature and our actions and examines things in a way that offers lyric insight—“Of wraith wisdom this: self love.”
By focusing on a “Little Scar,” Peacock enters the realm of timeless loss. She dares to follow her feelings as the words lead to a renewed “place we reenter as we change.” Triumph prevails as disappointment is followed by “another goal…/A second bud” that “unseen inches through the stem of each day.”
(W.W. Norton, 2008)
Begin again. Be true. Hold on and hold dear. That’s what The Second Blush is about. Molly Peacock dedicates this one to her husband. The two teenage sweethearts were swept apart by circumstances only to rejoin in midlife.
Based on the domestic, the poems also glisten with mythic traces. Rain bejewels a leaf. Broken dishes, housecats and painted toes share the pages with a masturbating gargoyle and the “throne of fear.”
Peacock’s metaphysical deliberations commence with a precise thought. Objects like a good luck charm or events like an argument on Pearse Street in Dublin serve as triggers. Some poems are modern sonnets with rhyming or slant rhyming couplets at the end. The metaphors are crisply succinct. In “Old Friends” cursive writing is a “pleasure…/a measure of lines made by our lives...”
Peacock is not all over the place. Some poems begin where others leave off. She draws down on nature and our actions and examines things in a way that offers lyric insight—“Of wraith wisdom this: self love.”
By focusing on a “Little Scar,” Peacock enters the realm of timeless loss. She dares to follow her feelings as the words lead to a renewed “place we reenter as we change.” Triumph prevails as disappointment is followed by “another goal…/A second bud” that “unseen inches through the stem of each day.”
March 26, 2017
I first read this collection almost six years ago to the day. All but one of the favorites I had marked have changed and I have new favorites now, so maybe I'll try to remember to read it in another 6 years or so and see if they've changed again. It's nice that poetry can be so adaptable.
July 9, 2018
Insightful observations of Life’s everyday moments, like sunbeams sifting through the fading light of the remains of the day, illuminating the obvious and the obscure. Favorites include “The Cliffs of Mistake,” “Little Scar,” “Fellini the Cat,” and “The Waking” (a refreshing reworking of Roethke’s “The Waking”).
October 26, 2013
Molly Peacock is like a force of nature in my world. She is whimsy in the same package with pathos. She amuses even as she moves me to tears. Oh how I wish I could do that.
Take "Our Minor Art," which begins here
We make love better unobserved--not that
we'd ever throw the new cats off the bed.
moves to this:
but the fact that they stay is like being
visited by minor gods. And we love the minor.
It inspires us because we like being
close to its genius -- something we might
come to understand . . .
Unlike, the poem goes on to say, "capitalized" God or "uppercase" Art.
So, from an amusing domestic anecdote, the poem moves to a major philosophical or perhaps theological point and then back to the domestic, transformed now to small a art:
yet our transformation here in bed is art,
something best made unobserved, even by cats,
who leap off as we forget them and ourselves.
The way to the major is through the minor as Peacock well knows.
Take "Our Minor Art," which begins here
We make love better unobserved--not that
we'd ever throw the new cats off the bed.
moves to this:
but the fact that they stay is like being
visited by minor gods. And we love the minor.
It inspires us because we like being
close to its genius -- something we might
come to understand . . .
Unlike, the poem goes on to say, "capitalized" God or "uppercase" Art.
So, from an amusing domestic anecdote, the poem moves to a major philosophical or perhaps theological point and then back to the domestic, transformed now to small a art:
yet our transformation here in bed is art,
something best made unobserved, even by cats,
who leap off as we forget them and ourselves.
The way to the major is through the minor as Peacock well knows.
March 1, 2009
A wonderful variety of forms awaits you in addition to snippets from life about the things women care about more. Things like grandmother's rocking chair and cats and scars and that broken tea cup that won't be raised again, ever - even if you live to be a hundred. I like that sonnets are still her primary form but like good recipes, an extra shake or two or a little less doesn't phase the spread.
My copy of this book is signed as Molly was at the National Book Festival in 2008. At the festival, she read the funniest poem about burying her mother in clip-ons. It's difficult to do funny death poems, and Billy Collins has cornered the market I think, but Molly's delivery and content were dead on.
My copy of this book is signed as Molly was at the National Book Festival in 2008. At the festival, she read the funniest poem about burying her mother in clip-ons. It's difficult to do funny death poems, and Billy Collins has cornered the market I think, but Molly's delivery and content were dead on.
August 25, 2008
I was going to begin my meager review of this book with 'ick' but that's so immature. But Molly takes on the blessed task of getting out some formal poetry - sonnets, rhymes, rhythms and what not. It's just not my bag so I had a very hard time enjoying it. So much so, that I wasn't able to enjoy it at all. : ( Molly was the first poet I ever worked with and she and her work were so encouraging so I've been following her rise in the poetry world (yes there IS a poetry world!)
July 20, 2012
I have loved Ms. Peacock's poetry from the first time I started reading it--the book "Original Love"--and this book, although written years later, is almost as good as my first experience. Ms. Peacock writes predominantly free verse, but she makes amazing use of end rhyme. It's almost a hybrid of free and formal verse. Just lovely.
February 11, 2011
She was my teacher at SUNY-Binghamton. She had a generosity of spirit. These poems fit my life now as she writes about her marriage after so many years.
Update: We went to hear Molly read last night 2/10/2011. She was witty and funny. The poetry was great.
Update: We went to hear Molly read last night 2/10/2011. She was witty and funny. The poetry was great.
January 24, 2009
A competent book of poetry, but not one that particularly captured me either thematically, stylistically, or with any special language. I do like the book's title which manages to capture a number of the themes in its simplicity.
July 22, 2008
What a delightful bit of poetry. I believe something like this anthology would be the product of Billy Collins and Georgia O'Keeffe trapped in the same brain.
October 16, 2008
poems.....so-so
May 14, 2009
There are 2 poems in this collection I really liked. Comtemporary style. It's worth a read.
July 21, 2010
Of course I loved this book. "Confession" is my favorite poem in it. I can't wait to read it again.
December 27, 2010
Like reading song lyrics. I read many of these poems more than once, thinking "Wow!"
December 29, 2010
Check out my review at http://vetmedandlit.blogspot.com/2010...
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews