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.

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A Few Paragraphs from Molly Peacock about The Second Blush


Are there any contemporary married love poems? Is “married love” a contradiction in terms? When you open an anthology of love poetry, is there even a section for poems of long-term love? (Wait, I think I saw a couple of pages tucked in just before the huge section of divorce poems…)

I wrote The Second Blush in response to those questions, as well as to add a few more pages to that slender section. I wanted the poems to be quirky, affectionate, unpredictable, and reflective of the deep, complex emotional undertones in a marriage — all leavened with humor, and all structured with the ghost of the love sonnet.

The poems came in response to an assignment I gave myself: 14 lines, single image. Sometimes I really did write 14 lines, and a live, contemporary sonnet to boot. Other times, 14 turned into 20. Coming up with a single image for each poem turned out to be equally hard. Multiple images crowded my imagination, though sometimes I put them through a mental strainer and came up with just one that I could revisit in the poem, making it a kind of metaphysical verse. Every once in a while I met both requirements. But giving myself the assignment let me complete the book, since I wrote it in between rehearsals and performances of my one-woman show in poems, "The Shimmering Verge."

The surprise of these poems, for me, was how many of them had to do with mistakes: making them, living with them, being afraid of them, surviving them. The book ends with "The Flaw," a poem that views flaws as necessary — and rescuing. My husband has survived a life-threatening illness, and he has a steady but casual embrace of life that comes, I think, from knowing he might have left it. He's serene about the everyday detritus of things that go awry. Not me! The seesawing back and forth between his calmness and my quick, emotive reactions is also a big part of this book.

The third section of the four that make up a kind of quartet of sections in The Second Blush doesn't contain love poems at all: these are poems about friendship, about past love, about women, art, ageing, and cats. Yes, this books risks several cat poems. It turned out that the feline world paralleled the married world in affecting ways.

The two artichokes, nose to nose, on the cover of this book signal its poems, I think. Are those long-married artichokes? Still alive, still green, with a bit of a blush around the tips.

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Praise for Molly Peacock:
“She has a luxuriantly sensual imagination — and an equally sensual feel for the language. In mood her poems range from high-spirited whimsy to bemused reflection. Whatever the subject, rich music follows the tap of Molly Peacock’s baton.” — Washington Post

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Visit Molly Peacock's website.

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Molly Peacock is an internationally recognized poet whose work has appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and The Best of the Best American Poetry. She is currently the poetry editor of the Literary Review of Canada and general series editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in English. She lives in Toronto.

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