Molly Peacock is a poet of raw grace, metaphysical impulse, and daring confessional candor who courts complexity both in the supple bending of closed forms and in the complex emotional states those forms allow her to express. Dense, sensuous, intimate, frankly conversational, explosive in their subject matter, and inventively resonant in their sound patterns, her poems are propelled by what she calls "the drive for what is real, deeper than the brain's detail--the drive to feel" (from "Desire," in Raw Heaven [1984]). The problems of expressing human desire in words, of articulating love in its various forms, and of understanding the meaning of that experience constitute the core, but by no means the limits, of Peacock's imaginative reach. By turns questing and questioning, the narratives and meditations that make up Peacock's complex poetic world are ones that glory in sex and the animalism of human nature, in the provocative...