Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems

by Molly Peacock

"Molly Peacock's precision in Cornucopia makes each moment ignite with bounteous pleasures."―Yusef Komunyakaa 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.

Genres: Poetry

252 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2002

About the author

Molly 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.

Reviews

[christopher leibow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cornucopia, is a collection of poems that demonstrate a great precision, and a conscious awareness of being without being overly conscious. Peacock’s precision isn’t necessarily the precision of a simple observational detail, but the precision of the interrelations of objects to each other.
"Repair" is a powerful poem in observing the relation we have with the broken objects of meaning. The breaking the “toy box”, and “the clock” at first blush, seem the betray our clumsy attempts for knowledge and how through our attempts to understand we tend to destroy the thing we examining. I love the how she illustrates our learning of the thing at the cost of their destruction. “You see how things work/ in the moment they are destroyed. I think this also gives an insight into our being in the world. How damaging something is a path to understanding. This give the title its added impact.
I was intrigued by her formal mastery in many of the poems. The rhymes are fractured which give the poems a validity to their subject. This is an author with authority. I have issues with more formal metered poetry, but Peacock has a such a skill, to make the meter so organic, that it is not stilted or forced, but natural and organic it each poem.
I personally was moved by the poem, “The Commands of Love” It reminded me powerfully of my care-taking relationship with my own mother. “This is why we hover over those in pain/ doing things unasked for and unwanted/ hoping simply with our bodies to cover pain// as if to protect it. There is a powerful honesty and vulnerability in the last stanza, “ Both the face of pain and the face of the one,/ riveted to it in relief believe there’s still / something to get, something to get done. “ I understand viscerally the hesitancy, this desperation that Peacock is describing. I think this stanza works so well, in the how she uses the gaze of both subjects to demonstrate their interrelatedness, even when they are coming from different perspectives.

[Lea · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first attempt at reading this book was like a car that won’t start. I just could not connect. I set it aside for a few days and then went back to it. The second time around, it was like my mind had warmed up and everything went smoothly. Molly Peacock finds the neglected corners of life and clears the air there. It feels intentionally thoughtful of her to lend us these experiences. By the end, I felt so accepting of myself even though this book is so personal to Peacock’s life. Very rewarding to have read the entire book.

[Jill Davis · Rating 1 out of 5]

Maybe it's because I'm more old fashioned when it comes to poetry, but this was not for me. Apparently all new poetry is like this now. Don't really like it. That's just me.

[Margo · Rating 5 out of 5]

every single poem in this book is a banger

[makenna dykstra · Rating 4 out of 5]

highlights: “ash wednesday, hurrying eastward”; “let me manage something simple”; “those paperweights with snow inside”; “desire”; & “trying to evangelize a cut flower”

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started reading this collection from poet Molly Peacock months ago, and then lost track of it on my shelf. I wanted to return to it before the year was over...and stayed up past midnight tonight sampling Peacock's work, both "recent" (well, 2002) and selected (from as far back as 1975: what she and/or her editor consider her "greatest hits," I imagine).

I loved some, but there were others that just left me staring at the page, thinking huh?. I tended to like the later poems better, such as "Conversation," "The Soul House," "Breakfast with Cats," and "Why I Am Not a Buddhist."

But another favorite, "The Lawns of June," is from 1980: a meditation on, or perhaps more accurately dissection of, suburban life, with its lawns of "thick chartreuse gouache" and "roads black as silk." The final lines:

"...These geometries
are love's tired proofs: the badinage of wheel
and road and walk and lawn and drive and curb
and sign and line all flush, flushed with a soft
raillery of values laying the grids
we make with one another, a couple
talking in bed, water glass near
the Bible, a child's torn bear in his arm."

Peacock is a poet of the beautiful line but also of the bold idea. I did so like her argument in "Why I Am Not a Buddhist": "But why is desire suffering?/Because want leaves a world in tatters?/How else but in tatters should a world be?" Such a good question...

[Joanne Merriam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was fortunate to see Molly Peacock read at Vanderbilt University from this book in October 2010. She’s tremendously expressive. One of the audience members asked about the performance aspect of her poetry and she said that somebody (a voice coach? I think?) had asked why she only uses the middle register of her voice when she reads, and it was like a light went on and now she uses all registers. She read “Aubade” (one of my favourites) and talked about how “A Favor of Love” was a true story (readers can sample it at The Poetry Foundation's site). She was very funny (after being introduced by Mark Jarman, she said she was about to read us a sonnet, and we could judge for ourselves how holy it was).

Her poetry is lovely, thoughtful and full of unexpected moments of humour. Her formal poetry appears to have been written effortlessly (I know from experience how difficult that is to pull off). She writes about difficult moments in personal relationships with great sensitivity and understanding. A wonderful poet and a wonderful collection of her work.

[Marne Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The thing with these huge volumes of poems by one author is that I almost always find I love the author’s work from certain time periods while I am left cold by others. I really liked the poems in this collection from the mid-1980’s, especially the ones from Take Heart, which focus on complex feelings after the death of a parent. In much the same way I feel when enjoying a greatest hits collection from an unfamiliar band, I want to go back, read that whole collection, and find out what else I might be missing.

[Sherry Chandler · Rating 5 out of 5]

A friend once said to me, "Molly Peacock is a force of nature." It is so.