Molly Peacock chooses 152 colors of Crayola’s Ultimate Crayon Collection to illustrate widowhood in The Widow’s Crayon Box: Poems. Why choose the “ultimate” collection as her metaphor? Because, as Peacock writes, “the eight child-colors of Crayola boxes / are far too basic and behaved —” Agreed. A collection of 152 crayons is rich, like a birthday gift from a special aunt. Imagine finding a request for all those colors on September’s back-to-school supply list. There would be anarchy. Chaos! Too many choices. Too dear. A box like that contains a wild amount of freedom.
Peacock’s many shades of widowhood evoke memories of “viridian” sex, questions like “why, bluebell-why” and colorless sympathy from those who “beige-say, I’m sorry to hear that.” But as much as this collection reflects upon lives shared over decades past, it also looks forward with curiosity, understanding that the “scent of lost affection, / is what gives loneliness its worth.”
The Widow’s Crayon Box is divided into four sections. “Part One: After” depicts the onset of Peacock’s widowhood, a lonely, problematic time when she admits “everything touches me, / now that I’m not touched, but moved.” “Part Two: Before” draws from life as the “the anchoring wife” to a chronically ill “9-time cancer survivor.” This section also establishes the counterargument that the “anchoring wife” is likewise “an invalid” whose own “growing up too soon invalidated / childhood.” Peacock is the adult child of an alcoholic father, and these poems make the case that she needs care, too. “Part Three: When” outlines the journey from “MAID: Medical Assistance in Dying, Toronto” to cremation. Finally, “Part Four: Afterglow” turns toward resolution. Resolution is “purple and peach streaks / Behind the near-night clouds.” It is “crisp gold type on a black, matte folder” — legalities, decisions, and tasks like the codicil. Resolution is an intersection. It is the shelf in the refrigerator where the speaker turns to place her own yellow Honey Crisps after a lifetime of shared red apples.
If problems, turns, and resolutions remind you of a sonnet, you’re correct. The Widow’s Crayon Box is filled with sonnets chained, linked, doubled, and redoubled. Phillis Levin, author of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English, describes this form as a “moment of praise” and “a chamber of sudden change.” Although one might expect elegiac idealization after the death of a chronically ill spouse, Peacock turns as well to the challenging resolve of the sonnet:
Pure love, pure feeling, not love and illness mixed,
is like pure taste — the way kids won’t mix
foods on their plates, each flavor separated.
(Too bad grownup plates aren’t divided.)
With the purity of ginger chopped and brewed
I hated my sister. Such hatred cleared
the nostrils! My hatred of you combined
the salt-cinnamon of fury with thyme spines
of fear, the bay leaf of wariness,
and at 7pm I’d love-hate you most,
the exact time I had to deliver
dinner on your drug trial — timing those roast
fucking parsnips … that was the love-cleaver.
A caregiver really is a mother.
Does Peacock establish the counterargument of her own illness so she can blurt truths about an ill-defined border between love and hate? In this sixth poem of the sonnet redoubled, the poet slides her distaste for the mothering responsibilities demanded by her husband’s illness beneath references to familial tensions she suffered as a child. She disparages her sister who was “born ill, a preemie after the War,” because the infant intruded on what precious little time the speaker, aged three, had with their mother. The poet’s use of hyphens in the compounds “love-hate” and “love-cleaver” shows how passions shift so fast that they elide.
The Widow’s Crayon Box includes epigraphs from Virginia Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill.” Woolf writes that illness brings out a confessional nature, “a childish outspokenness.” Such traits seem entirely suited to a box of crayon-wielding poems. In the CBC documentary What Can a Widow Be? Peacock explains: “Widowhood connects a woman to her girlhood, to another time in her life when she was free and alone, and I see the seeds of my young self growing in different ways in my old self. It’s like a second blooming. There is a lovely, youthful elixir in widowhood.” And so, the sonnet, Levin’s “chamber of sudden change,” becomes the ideal place for this older widowed woman to shift back into a crayon-hued possibility of second youth.
In addition to studying Peacock’s multiple sonnets, I enjoyed discovering clues to other poetic forms and strategies. “Routines” appears to be related to a rondeau. “Organic Sadness, Compost Style” is perhaps a non-traditional ghazal? “Pancake Ode” — self-explanatory. “Fior de Zucca” delivers a delicious moment, haiku. Cutlery flies out of drawers in the chaotic imagery of “Where Does it Live?” And there is more visual chaos in “The Realization”: a plethora of punctuation (em dashes, periods, commas, question marks, exclamation marks, parentheses) as well as the compound “thought-grabbed.” There are italics, all caps, right margin starts, and phrases floating in white space. And after all that commotion, this poem concludes with one panicky realization: “My lifelong friend is gone.” Repetition abounds because Peacock insists “poetry is meant to be repeated. And each reconnection for [her] is a personal kind of healing.” The poem “Touched” uses chiasmus to present an idea and then elaborate upon that idea. It inverts the opening line as the closing line: “When I feel moved and then say I am touched, / … now that I’m not touched, but moved.” These thoughts balance against one another. They nestle head to toe, opposite but interconnected like images of the couple sleeping together in “Threshold” and “Hello, Lovebirds!”
The speaker may be lonely, but she is not alone in this collection. There are allusions to John Donne and George Herbert as well as quotations from Virginia Woolf and Julia Prinsep Stephen’s Notes from Sick Rooms, 1883. Peacock’s second sonnet cycle brings up the fight with metaphorical “crumbs” in her patient’s bed, echoing Prinsep Stephen’s 19th-century treatise. Peacock’s poem “The Plexiglass Wall” is a double sonnet conjuring Herbert’s “Prayer” and Donne’s “Batter My Heart.” In her 2017 essay “Donne and the Vital Verb,” Peacock writes: “His dazzling verbs allowed me to develop a way of writing poetry that tried to catch contrary emotional currents. Writing a poem became a way for me to figure out feelings both by naming them (à la Herbert) and by re-experiencing them through what they predicated, even though that was full of reversals and strange turns.” And so here we are again, at a strange turn, the description of a sonnet’s volta.
My favourite quotation from The Widow’s Crayon Box does not gleam with any of Crayola’s 152 ultimate hues. But it does contain strong verbs of a most colorful sort:
I careened into being your wife
like a cat shooting through all eight wheels
of a moving tractor trailer. Now it’s you lighting off
across the street to begin your tenth life.
Marriage. Widowhood. What a wild ride. And by the end of this collection, we see the speaker moving forward. The plexiglass wall dividing inside from outside is gone, and she now dreams of sleeping on a platform outside a “three-walled house that opened to the woods.” And there she sees a speckled fawn, its nose “black and wet,” its tongue “a forest pink.” These feel like the shades of freedom. They are the colors of this widow’s new life.
[Published by W.W. Norton on November 5, 2024. 95 pages, $26.99 US / $35.99 CAN, hardcover]