The Widow’s Crayon Box, Poems by Molly Peacock ff
The Anna Karenina principle might have merit, that all happy families are alike, but when one member dies, say one member of a marriage, the similarity, along with some of the happiness, passes through a prism and splits into an array of variation. I became a widow a few months after Molly and I find her idea/metaphor of the mammoth crayon box to be a gift. So much distress is caused by the feeling that our grief must conform to some preordained chain. Ideas on the stages of grief abound and give people who have enough to feel and process the additional, and crazy, notion that there is one right way to grieve. With this book of poems, the full spectrum of color is at our disposal.
Along with color, water is an image that dominates the work – swimming in memory, diving, being pummeled by rain, tears. Through the images the story emerges of a relationship that started when they were teens, ended, and then reignited when they were adults in their forties. Part of the story is his long illness and her history as a caretaker when she needed a caretaker herself.
Playfulness and poetry writing often meet because generating original word groups, as this poet does, requires the freedom to make spontaneous associations. Tiny Things is fun. We hear such whimsical notions as “a “t” flies off a word” or
an itchy long-ago remark
hardens into a pea-stone
under mattress-layers
of the unconscious
In case we missed it, she lets us know that she is alluding to that fussy fairy-tale princess. And what about the “t”? Well, if you put it back on issue it is tissue. What is going on beneath the fun is a gurney transporting the patient.
My favorite poem in the collection is Woman in Kitchen with Yellow Apple. Sometimes the dead don’t stay dead. Our minds won’t let them.
