Original Love: Poems [Hardcover]

Molly Peacock (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1995

A fourth collection of poems by Molly Peacock, this book shows the poet at the height of her powers. Using her trademark rhymes, characteristic humour and daring sexual and psychological openness, Peacock intertwines several types of love in the poems: a narrative of mid-life love and marriage, the tangled knot of mother/daughter love, a quest for the spiritual, and finally a vibrant love of the self.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Peacock (Take Heart) moves away from her well-crafted formal poems, many virtually indistinguishable from those of a dozen other poets, to speak here in a voice uniquely her own. Explicit eroticism rivals that of Sharon Olds, while the angst welling up in some innocent rhymes echoes Sylvia Plath's "Daddy." As Peacock says in a poem offering instructions for suicide: "you feel pain,/ my darling thing, because you feel warm." The woman narrating these poems hates her body and its demands as much as she hates her mother and her needs, especially the care required by her parent in her dying. Frequent sexual references seethe with undertones of sadomasochism. Exploring three loves-for lover, mother, self-Peacock presents a highly charged portrait of a woman moving out of a dysfunctional family, needing to be safely cherished by another before coming to terms with her past, and finally learning to love herself. Although burdened by knowledge of human fallibility, Peacock's relentless search is deterred by neither illness nor death.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Readers of Peacock's poetry will recognize in this fourth collection a familiar motif: the need to articulate difficulties with familial, interpersonal, and sexual relationships. Peacock is most imaginative when she's describing a painful experience, one that endangers "throttled love." Mixing the cerebral and the raw, awareness catalyzed by trauma, her language is raised to explicitness. Exploring boundaries between men and women, mother and daughter, and one's mind, body, and senses, she wonders whether anything is still inviolable; in this mental landscape, it is difficult to distinguish between desire and suffering. Peacock's tough redemption is for pleasure and selfhood to have meaning. Accomplished and witty, this anatomy of "original" love is not for the fainthearted; it's for those who believe that is is still possible to feel deeply.
Frank Allen, West Virginia State Coll., Institute
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 91 pages
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc (April 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039303741X
• ISBN-13: 978-0393037418
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,367,700 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly Recommended, September 15, 2011

By 

Julie Doe (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Original Love: Poems (Paperback)

Would it be cliché to say I love this book of poems about love?

This is Ms. Peacock's fourth book of poems, but it is the first of hers that I have read. This was another used book store gem of a find (the other was "Twelve Moons" by Mary Oliver which I have also reviewed). Most of the poems are free verse, but rhyme is often incorporated. Some of the poems are modern takes on formal poetry. All-in-all, it's a nice mix that continually surprises the reader.

The book is broken into three parts: Part 1 - First Love, Part II - Mother Love, and Part III - Another Love. The opening poem, "Why I Am Not a Buddhist", serves an introduction to book. The poem speaks about the author's love of emotion, of want, of desire. It includes the lines, "... I love the things I've sought-- / you in your beltless bathrobe, tongues of cash that loll / from my billfold--and love what I want: clothes, / houses, redemption. ...".

My favorite poem - "Lullaby" - occurs in Part I. The poem starts out, "Big as a down duvet the night / pulls the close Ontario sky / over the naked earth. ...". The other poems in part one explore the love of a boyfriend/spouse/significant other. In this section, I also particularly liked "The Wheel" and "The Purr". Ms. Peacock is does not shy away from explicit language, yet it never feels forced or vulgar.

Part II deals with Ms. Peacock's relationship with her mother. Part III explores religion, faith, and other types of love. A couple of poems that I particularly liked from the latter poritons of the book include:

"The Spider Heart" which begins, "Sleeping with my husband in my mother's bed / the night she died, I expected the tree-- / the one that Emerson said grew tall and wide / after his father died--but woke up instead / with a spider wedged in my rib cage..."

"The Guilt" which begins, "Guilt creeps like sheets of insects that erase / bodies down to their skeletons..."

This is another book I highly recommend. I've read this one so many times I've broken the hardback binding and need to get another copy.

5.0 out of 5 stars Poems which are personal and universal at the same time, January 4, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (US) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Original Love: Poems (Paperback)

Original Love contains 91 pages of intensely personal and universal poems. The author divides these poems into three sections; First Love, Mother Love and Other Love. In 'So What If I'm In Love', a poem in the first section, I felt as if I were the one who accidently left "... the penguin sweatshirt ... smelled both of him and time ..." on the subway. I felt the pain of loss along with her as the subway doors closed and his scent went with it. Poems dealing with her mother's life and death comrpise the second section. In 'Raptor', Peacock accepts her mother's death on its own terms while imagining how her own death will happen. "Foolishly I'd imagined for you your mother's death, not your own ... who knows what death I'll get exactly, being daughterless, the line begetting neutralized, in hands beyond love". In the final section, poems like 'Simple' address her spiritual side; "When the wafer dissolves on my tongue I wonder what part of the Lord I have eaten," while 'Forgiveness' verbalizes finding peace with her past ..."the felt lightness of existence self-created, forgiveness". Something in each of these poems spoke to me as I were their narrator. I wish I had written them. I recommend this collection to anyone who wishes to dig into the heart and mind of a woman.

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4.0 out of 5 stars Wow, February 1, 2012

By 

Brenda - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Original Love: Poems (Paperback)

Be prepared for a candid but fun reading! Molly is raw in her poems about sex that will make you blush.