Molly Peacock's vital and intimate poetry stakes its imaginative reach on what she calls "the drive for what is real, deeper than the brain's detail: the drive to feel" ("Desire," Raw Heaven , 1984). In three volumes where the play of predictability and surprise provide a framework for sensuous details, Peacock's skillful wielding of form ensures a continuous dialectic between the inner world of memory and feeling and the external world. She accomplishes this dynamic, the balance between inner and outer worlds, by employing sound patterns that keep the poem close to unconscious rhythms and by using images or metaphors from the civilized and the natural worlds. Her work is both a play of form and a form of play. The lyrics, often couched in traditional forms such as the sonnet, set up expectations while the conversational tone, the rhetorical gestures of the language, and the verbal wit in the...