Selected Comments

" 'Cornucopia' by Molly Peacock is a big celebratory book of her new and selected poems, 1975 to 2002. Peacock's attention to form is famous, as is her often frank, unabashed choice of subject matter — poems about drunken parents, sex, masturbation — set hard by poems extolling more gentle intimacies."

          — Carol Muske-Dukes. Los Angeles Times.

"There's a delicious tang to Peacock's vital poems-a taste of earth, salty and laced with iron, a headiness like that carried by the breeze just before a spring rain. This electric juiciness is just as pungent in poems from 27 years ago as it is in the suite of new poems. The older poems in this volume have appeared in four previous collections of her work, including Raw Heaven (1984) and Original Love (1995). Wielding bright metaphors and adeptly combining story and lyricism, Peacock makes the annealing of the self in the furnace of family and the fever of erotic love her signature theme. Her insouciant wit deflects a brooding soul in surprising and gratifyingly lucid poems that mesh a rich physicality with arresting emotional precision. In her newest work, Peacock interprets her vision of "The Land of Shi," a fugitive Celtic realm that manifests itself whenever "the air suddenly intensifies, and you are in another world," an elegant description of the magic of poetry and a place Peacock carries readers to in style."

          — Donna Seaman. The Booklist.

"Forecast: Peacock's poems of the 1980s may seem less original now than they did then; verse celebrations of women's sexuality are no longer uncommon, and the New Formalist movement has lost the oppositional energy it once had. On the other hand, Peacock, president emeritus of the Poetry Society of America, remains very much a presence in magazines, and the poems' storytelling powers are as good as ever: look for this book to be in prize contention."

          — Michael Scharf. Publishers Weekly.

Molly Peacock's works copyright © to the author.