Paper Garden

Description from Amazon

Paper Garden: Mrs Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72 Paperback – May 1, 2012

Molly Peacock (Author)

Mary Delany was seventy-two years old when she noticed a petal drop from a geranium. In a flash of inspiration, she picked up her scissors and cut out a paper replica of the petal, inventing the art of collage. It was the summer of 1772, in England. During the next ten years she completed nearly a thousand cut-paper botanicals (which she called mosaicks) so accurate that botanists still refer to them. Poet-biographer Molly Peacock uses close-ups of these brilliant collages in The Paper Garden to track the extraordinary life of Delany, friend of Swift, Handel, Hogarth, and even Queen Charlotte and King George III.How did this remarkable role model for late blooming manage it? After a disastrous teenage marriage to a drunken sixty-one-year-old squire, she took control of her own life, pursuing creative projects, spurning suitors and gaining friends.

A fresh meditation on friendship and creativity — Diana Athill * The Times * ‘Whatever the subject, rich music follows the tap of Molly Peacock’s baton’ * Washington Post * [A] graceful meditation on botany, nature, life and age … Delaney’s story abounds with energy as Peacock brings her alive. Like her glorious multilayered collages, Delany is so vivid a character she almost jumps from the page * New York Times * Elegantly written and handsomely illustrated … an unmitigated delight * Financial Times * Exquisite * Evening Standard Books of the Year * In Molly Peacock’s illustrated biography, the results leap out of the darkness of the past, pulsating with life * Economist *

Molly Peacock is the award-winning author of six volumes of poetry, including The Second Blush. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and the Times Literary Supplement. Among her other works are How to Read a Poem … and Start a Poetry Circle and a memoir, Paradise, Piece by Piece. Peacock, a member of the Spalding University brief residency MFA graduate faculty, is currently the general series editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in English. A transplanted New Yorker, she lives in Toronto.