1. How do Molly Peacock’s love poems in The Second Blush, such as “Marriage,” “Quick Kiss,” “Our Minor Art,” “The Vow,” or “Faraway,” fit with your idea of a “standard” love poem? What qualifies a poem as a “love” poem, anyway?

2. Both “The Blanket” and “Confession” address the reader the way Charlotte Brontë addresses the reader at the end of Jane Eyre when Brontë writes, “Reader, I married him.” How would you describe the poet-reader relationship that Peacock sets up?

3. While her poems are firmly rooted in the everyday, Molly Peacock also allows the strangeness of her visions into her poems, from the newspaper photo that comes to life in “Teacup Manifesto” to the insult that actually becomes a physical wound in “Vision in the Backseat of a Taxi” to the condo-dwelling woman who identifies with a cow who has escaped an abattoir in “Pedicure.” How do these visions affect you as a reader?

4. Illness and a sense of how illness both defines and enriches life pervade these poems. Peacock has referred to her “two-track life,” both living as though each moment is the last and simultaneously living as though a future is stretching out luxuriously. In her poem “The Silver Arrow” Peacock crosses out words to capture this idea. Do you have a sense of this “two-track” existence? How do poems such as “The Silver Arrow” or “Our Xanadu” inform your own ideas on planning for the future versus seizing the day? What is the effect of those cross-outs?

5. Nighttime and dreams are vital states for the poet in The Second Blush. Are there common themes, or perhaps a chronological or psychological progression from “Of Night” to “The Match” to “In the Winter Dark” to “Small Fry” to “Our Waking”?

6. There are heaps of domestic images in Peacock’s poems, including a cup in “Good Fortune” and in “The Cup,” a wineglass in “Ferocity in a Dishpan,” a paperclip in “Pink Paperclip,” garden ornaments in “The Garden Giraffes,” a clothes hamper in “Ghost Cat,” and a toilet in “Widow.” How do these small everyday images suggest the larger ideas of life and death in her poems?

7. Peacock connects food and love in her poems “Picnic” and “Artichoke Heart,” yet these poems almost oppose each other in theme. How does she arrive at food as a link between the past and the present?

8. The poet writes about a wide range of interactions between female friends, from “Old Friends” to “The Fly.” How does Peacock treat the subtleties of female friendship? Do you share her views on how the male artist portrays the sculpted woman in “Girl and Friends View Naked Goddess”?

9. Mistakes, second-guessing, and flaws form a distinct thread through The Second Blush. What is your take on Peacock’s creation of a “philosophy of error” in “The Cliffs of Mistake” and “The Flaw”?

10. Molly Peacock is one of Canada’s premier formal poets. She says that the essence of the sonnet is “the magic proportion of eight and six, or a similar ratio,” not the stricture of the rhyme scheme or number of lines. There are many more forms of the sonnet than the traditional Shakespearean sonnet of fourteen lines, which has three rhyming quatrains and a final rhyming couplet. How is Peacock stretching the sonnet? How is she paying homage to tradition?

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