A poet’s homage to a bond formed with her psychoanalyst
“Only when/something’s over can its shape materialize,” Molly Peacock writes in the final poem in The Analyst.
She’s writing about making sense of past experience through psychoanalysis, but she’s also suggesting that poetry can serve the same purpose.
So the book’s title literally refers to Joan Workman Stein, Peacock’s long-time psychoanalyst. But it’s also a subtle hint that the poet herself is an analyst of sorts, applying the conventions of the art form to transform raw experience.
Peacock’s writing crosses genres (she’s also published a memoir, a biography of the-18th-century British artist Mary Delany and a collection of short fiction). But she’s primarily known as a poet and arguably has a higher profile in the United States than Canada. (She lives in Toronto, but was born in Buffalo and spent many years in New York City.)
In The Analyst, her seventh collection, Peacock looks back on a relationship of 40 years that began within the formal bounds of psychoanalyst-patient, and morphed into a friendship in which, eventually, the role of helper was reversed when her analyst suffered a stroke.
The poems bear witness to loss and change in the lives of two women, but they also offer a remarkable account of the restorative power of creativity.
Through therapy, Peacock wrestles with inner demons from being “born into vio- lence” — her father was an alcoholic whose rages made life hell for the family — and comes to be able to “make plunder into art.”
Stein returns to painting, a vocation she had abandoned years before in favour of psychiatry, after the stroke robs her of the ability to continue practicing.
Peacock’s imagery is evocative, whether she’s describing her therapist’s devastating memory loss (it’s “the blast hole” and “a burnt gorge”) or her own buried anger, which she depicts as a kind of terrifying golem (“Anger chomped at the marriage wall/ate the glass windows of friendship/ and bled from its stone teeth”).
Peacock often uses rhyme and regular metre, and her poetry’s orderly grace can seem paradoxical when she’s describing intense, chaotic emotions.
But that lyrical craft is exactly what makes these poems resonate. Barbara Carey is a Toronto writer, and the Star’s poetry columnist.