The Analyst: Poems

When a psychoanalyst became a painter after surviving a stroke, her longtime patient, distinguished and beloved poet Molly Peacock, took up a unique task. The Analyst is a new, visceral, twenty-first century “in memoriam” of ambiguous loss in which Peacock brilliantly tells the story of a decades-long patient-therapist relationship that now reverses and continues to evolve. Peacock invigorates the notion of poetry as word-painting: A tapestry of images, from a red enameled steamer on a black stove to Tibetan monks funneling glowing sand into a painting, create the backdrop for her quest to define identity.

From “In Our Unexpected Future”:

…for frocks outlast pillars. But feelings

outlive frocks. The immaterial storms through,

a force beyond years (a mere four since you

were nearly felled). It isn’t what happened that lasts.

Not art, either, but the savory core. What’s felt.