Molly Peacock: Poetry of Spirited Form / Sensual Imagery
Couple Sharing A Peach
It's not the first time
we've bitten into a peach.
But now at the same time
it splits--half for each.
Our "then" is inside its "now,"
its halved pit unfleshed--
The rest of the poem can be found at the following website:
http://www.poets.org/poems/poems.cfm?prm...
Molly Peacock's poetry enlivens the moment! The images of her poetry capture the usual, the mundane, the common of life's moments, one after the other. These images weave, plough, pound, shout, the universal themes like love / death / wonder / fear and joy. And anger.
(I hear the rumbling of Great Niagara Falls.) In the above opening lines of the poem "Couple Sharing A Peach", the poet engages the reader with use of first person narrative. Immediately, one can identify with the intimacy of eating a piece of fruit simultaneously with someone else. Equally powerful, the image of a peach promotes ideas about fresh, new, juicy, and the action of blushing, for peaches blend the colors of yellow, orange, red into blush: love blushes.
Perhaps even a reader may blush with memory. However, the peach is not shared between lovers who just met. They shared fruit before. Still, the excitement of two halves perfectly split can only occur after many shared pieces of fruit, some of which might even have been sour or rotten. The last line reveals that despite repetition, there is still more mystery, more love; more about the couple is still buried. Peacock brings a repeated moment of intimacy under new scrutiny.
Critics have noted that Molly Peacock's poetry "speaks to what must be her strongest poetic theme and unifying device as a poet: love—as a constant to the human condition and to its many, sometimes harried, shapes in both our very personal lives and in contemporary America."
http://www.potpourri.org/editor/bios/bio...
Born in 1947 in the bustling harbor city of Buffalo, New York, Molly attended SUNY at Binghamton to earn her Bachelor of Arts degree and Johns Hopkins University to earn her Master of Arts, with honors. Throughout her career as a writer she has taught, created, directed various universities. She has earned many honors like poet-in-residence (Delaware State Arts Council in Wilmington, Delaware.
She has published several books which include And Live Apart (1980), Raw Heaven (1984), Take Heart (1989), and, most recently, Original Love (1995). Her poetry has appeared in a variety of literary magazines such as
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