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.
