Original Love1995

Fiercely intimate in its history and fiercely formal in its measures, this major new collection by Molly Peacock, her fourth, shows the poet at the height of her powers. Using her trademark rhymes, characteristic humor, and daring sexual and psychological openness, Peacock's poems intertwine at least four types of original love: a narrative of meeting again and marrying in midlife; the tangled knot of mother/daughter love; a quest for the spiritual; and finally a vibrant love of the self, triumphantly recovered after childhood abuse.