The Widow’s Crayon Box

Peacock’s affecting and confessional latest (after A Friend Sails in on a Poem) wrestles with the aftermath of her late husband’s terminal cancer diagnosis. Throughout, she cultivates a landscape of emotional dichotomies, such as the feeling of “love-hate,” which she experienced first while caring for her sick sister as a child and then again while caring for her husband. “I hated giving what I barely had away,” she divulges, symbolizing her depleted psyche as being “like a stout cup, a thick glass, empty inside.” Employing skillful symmetry, she begins a poem with the memory of budding teenage romance with her husband—“I yield to a turquoise sky, becoming young:/ a chartreuse vision of suburban lawns”—and ends it with his “death face, an abandoned clay quarry/ filled with memory water.” She later returns to this imagery to contend with the torrential nature of grief: “Don’t be sorry if you cannot cry/ in memory water. Just swim in it.” Droll musings offer moments of necessary levity: “Is the soul hairless? Does it never secrete or flake?// Does it not have bunions?” This lyrical and vibrantly forthright volume reveals the iridescence of bereavement. (Nov.)