Molly Peacock

The Paper Garden is unlike anything else you have ever read. At once a biography of an extraordinary 18th century gentlewoman and a meditation on late-life creativity, it is a beautifully written tour de force from an acclaimed poet. Mary Granville Pendarves Delany (1700-1788) was the witty, beautiful and talented daughter of a minor branch of a powerful family. Married off at 16 to a 61-year-old drunken squire to improve the family fortunes, she was widowed by 25, and henceforth had a small stipend and a horror of a marriage. She spurned many suitors over the next twenty years, including the powerful Lord Baltimore and the charismatic radical John Wesley. She cultivated a wide circle of friends, including Handel and Jonathan Swift. And she painted, she stitched, she observed, as she swirled in the outskirts of the Georgian court. In mid-life she found love, and married. Upon her husband's death 23 years later, she arose from her grief, picked up a pair of scissors and, at the age of 72, created a new art form, mixed-media collage. Over the next decade, Mrs Delany created an astonishing 985 botanically correct, breathtaking cut-paper flowers, now housed in the British Museum and referred to as the Botanica Delanica. Delicately, Peacock has woven parallels in her own life around the story of Mrs Delany's and, in doing so, has made this biography into a profound and beautiful examination of the nature of creativity and art. Gorgeously designed and featuring 35 full-colour illustrations, this is a sumptuous and lively book full of fashion and friendships, gossip and politics, letters and love. It's to be devoured as voraciously as one of the court dinners it describes. From the Hardcover edition.

Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life's Work at 72

The Paper Garden

Mary fought for a place as a professional artist without having to live as a tragic heroine. She married George Reid, Canadian muralist, and while their relationship was more equal than most, this was still the Edwardian age. How do you find time to paint when you need to get to the market to buy a chicken for dinner?

In Which Mary Hiester Reid Paints, Travels, Marries and Opens a Door

Flower Diary

Take the sumptuousness of Molly Peacock's own #1 bestselling The Paper Garden, the extraordinary creative variety of The Bedside Book of Birds, and the cat-nip-for-language-geeks appeal of Eats, Shoots and Leaves, and wrap it around tales rich with wisdom and humanity, and you get Alphabetique the most gorgeous gift book of the season. Molly Peacock has written a new classic, a book of magical tales inspired by the lives of the letters of the alphabet. Alphabetique, or Tales from the Lives of the Letters is one-of-a-kind, but nevertheless fits perfectly with Molly Peacock's extraordinary body of work, drawing on the same wellsprings of creativity and artistry as her poetry and her nonfiction, especially The Paper Garden. These 26 charming, incisive, sensual stories of love, yearning, and self-discovery are complimented by Kara Kosaka's layered, jewel-bright collages.

26 Characteristic Fictions

Alphabetique

The president emerita of the Poetry Society of America explores her decision not to have children through a sincere, profound account of her growth as a poet and as a woman, and of the choices that have shaped her fate. Reprint. NYT. K.

Paradise, Piece by Piece

A distinguished poet and former president of the Poetry Society of America offers advice on how to read poetry, presenting eighteen cherished poems, along with information about the poem and its author; presents practical tips on organizing a poetry reading group; and includes a suggested bibliography of favorite books. Reprint.

How to Read a Poem-- and Start a Poetry Circle

An unparalleled compilation of more than twenty-five innovative poets, selected from the dazzling panorama of contemporary Canadian verse.

30 Contemporary Canadian Poets

Open Field

“Graceful yet precise, poetic yet deeply rooted in research, this exploration of an overlooked painter is gorgeous — a joy to read. Molly Peacock’s insights and empathy with her subject bring to life both Mary Hiester Reid and her luscious flower paintings.” — Charlotte Gray, author of The Massey Murder Molly Peacock uncovers the history of neglected painter Mary Hiester Reid, a trailblazing artist who refused to choose between marriage and a career. Born into a patrician American family in the middle of the nineteenth century, Mary Hiester Reid was determined to be a painter and left behind women’s design schools to enter the art world of men. After she married fellow artist George Reid, she returned with him to his home country of Canada. There she set about creating over 300 stunning still life and landscape paintings, inhabiting a rich, if sometimes difficult, marriage, coping with a younger rival, exhibiting internationally, and becoming well-reviewed. She studied in Paris, traveled in Spain, and divided her time between Canada and the United States where she lived among America’s Arts and Crafts movement titans. She left slender written records; rather, her art became her diary and Flower Diary unfolds with an artwork for each episode of her life. In this sumptuous and precisely researched biography, celebrated poet and biographer Molly Peacock brings Mary Hiester Reid, foremother of painters such as Georgia O’Keefe, out of the shadows, revealing a fascinating, complex woman who insisted on her right to live as a married artist, not as a tragic heroine. Peacock uses her poet’s skill to create a structurally inventive portrait of this extraordinary woman whom modernism almost swept aside, weaving threads of her own marriage with Hiester Reid’s, following the history of empathy and examining how women manage the demands of creativity and domesticity, coping with relationships, stoves, and steamships, too. How do you make room for art when you must go to the market to buy a chicken for dinner? Hiester Reid had her answers, as Peacock gloriously discovers.

In Which Mary Hiester Reid Paints, Travels, Marries & Opens a Door

"Molly Peacock's precision in Cornucopia makes each moment ignite with bounteous pleasures."--Yusef Komunyakaa

New and Selected Poems

Cornucopia

poems

The analyst

Marc-Antonio Consoli

Dear Heart

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.

Original Love

Elise Paschen

Neil Neches

One hundred poems from the poetry placards in New York City's subway and buses. Amid ads for mace and cockroach exterminators, a happy glimmer in 16 lines or less. From Sappho, to W. H. Auden, to Chu Chen Po.

Molly Peacock

Books

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