The Widow’s Crayon Box,
Molly Peacock
Norton, 2025
The Widow’s Crayon Box is Molly Peacock’s eighth book of poetry, and one that speaks to the way in which a person grieves a spouse. Historically, traditionally, black has been the colour of mourning, but Peacock begins this collection by drawing on all the colours in a large Crayola box, not the “eight child-colors of crayon boxes” which are “far too basic and behaved” for the “emotional shades” needed to best describe the depth of great love and loss.
There are four parts in this collection—"After,” “Before,” “When,” and “Afterglow.” Peacock begins after her husband’s death, documenting the ways in which grief often unexpectedly arrives, writing, “After you died, I felt you next to me,/and over months you entered gradually/into that lake and disappeared…you’re done being you, and my loneliness is so extreme/that I feel moved by almost everything.” She writes of “memory water” and “the widow cloud,” invoking the power of scent that remains on the clean shirt that “emanates a mix/of perspiration, cancer drugs, and mint—/the Dr. Bronner’s soap you showered with.” She also references the rainbow of colours and designs of “thirty-eight pairs of socks” that are put out on a table, “once paired with Asics, now part of your myth.” In witnessing what’s been left behind, to begin, the speaker begins to build a new world for herself, knowing that she has no choice but to continue.
The architecture of the book works as Peacock’s poems move from present to past and back to present again. After the caretaking, the section that speaks to death, “When,” carefully cradles four intimate and heart wrenching poems. Then, with “Afterglow,” the poet moves into a reconstruction of life for the spouse who remains. In poems like “The Afterglow,” Peacock writes: “I miss our wordlessness/The brief touch of the hand/Like a whisper, midback//Now I live in the afterglow/Purple and peach streaks/Behind the near-night clouds//But getting used to twilight.” Upon her husband’s death, she “got up afterwards/You lying there alone/I stumbling out alone.” In “Organic Sadness, Compost Style,” using the beauty of anaphora to create a strong echo in the reader’s mind, the poet writes of how sadness surges after loss: “Like music shredding, no shedding, its notes,” and “Like a lush everything into every other thing.” There is no escaping the loneliness of grief.
Loneliness is a subject that so many avoid speaking or writing about, but Peacock embraces her dance with it, accepting that loneliness does not mean an end, but rather an assurance that someone was loved, that two people shared a deep love for many years. She describes loneliness as an abscess, or maybe “a line of infection/from a poison bite up an arm” that’s coloured in purple. It marks, as she writes in “The Realization,” coming to the final realization that “my lifelong friend is gone.”
Anyone who has been a caretaker to a loved one before they died will find this collection resonates. Peacock doesn’t shy away from what documenting what it’s like to care for someone’s failing health while trying to mind one’s own mental and physical health at the same time. In “Petting My Husband’s Head in my Lap,” the poet begins by writing: “When I am so ill, I hope I can be/as soft as you are.” In “Notes from Sick Rooms,” a sonnet corona, Peacock speaks truthfully when she asks the reader: “Who really wants to be a caregiver?” This is an honest question, as most who have been caretakers will relate when she writes “But I hated giving what I barely had away./Losing myself in the tunnel of need,/down the gravityless jumble of trays,/cups, pills, towels.” The work of a caregiver is about how “love and illness mixed,” and how “a caregiver really is a mother,” whether they are biological mothers or not. Peacock continues, “How exhausting it is to mix the roles up./Couldn’t I ever just be a lover?” Anyone who caregives becomes a sort of parent to whomever they are caring for at the time, regardless of the type of relationship that might initially bind the two people. The balance of the original relationship is so often upended by how to care for the ill person as they face death.
Love poems like “In the Mood” and “Sex After Seventy” are reminders to live in the moment, to take pleasure in the shared moments. The poet writes: “Once it was clear that we could die,/we thought: Let’s make the end sweet.” There is yoga, squats, dinner, and then a dance to “In the Mood,” leading to “the bed! We reach for one another…If we can choose our end, we choose it this way.” In “Sex After Seventy,” the poem begins, “After we cleaned out our closets/we started on our sex lives…& met/as a long surprise of a spring afternoon arrived/through the threshold of the closet/on a spare bed we’d been saving all our lives.” What strikes the reader, when reading this collection, is that all the poems are woven into one another. Memory plays a key role, but the present nudges in to remind the reader that, while they can reminisce, they must also always move forward.
In the final poems of The Widow’s Crayon Box, Molly Peacock writes about the nature of the soul, the power of vivid dreaming, the beauty and strength of a long-lived love, and the passage of time as we grieve a great and close loss. The lessons she recollects, from her time as friend, lover, spouse, caregiver, and widow are poignant ones. In a world that all too often turns its head away from grief, this collection serves as a powerful reminder that it is all part of life, and that love continues to weave itself into the lives of those who are left behind.
Kim Fahner lives and writes in
Sudbury, Ontario. Her newest book, a novel, is The Donoghue Girl
(Latitude 46, 2024). Her next book of poems, The Pollination Field, will
be published by Turnstone Press in 2025. She recently won first place for her
CNF essay, "What You Carry," in The Ampersand Review's 2024
essay contest. As well, Kim was named as a finalist for the 2023 Ralph
Gustafson Poetry Prize. She is the First Vice-Chair of The Writers' Union of
Canada (2023-25), a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting
member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. She may be reached via her website
at http://www.kimfahner.com
