Pascale Petit

Poetry Book Society Recommendation

Mythic and familial beasts roam the swamps and moors of Pascale Petit’s Beast. These spirits of the wild haunt the Camargue of Provence, the limestone Causses and gorges of the Languedoc, Indian tiger forests, the Amazon rainforest, and her home by Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. Some of these remote places are vestiges of earth’s pristine habitats, while other wildernesses are encaged in cellars of Paris, along with the world’s last species. Their essence is evoked in lithe and luxurious lines sometimes compressed as a trapped animal.

An estranged father reappears as a hunter, while Maman is an orb spider or a grand piano; both are predators. And there are earthly beasts – wild horses and bulls, lammergeiers, bee-eaters and catfish, remnants of a vanishing natural world. Beast asks asks if survival is possible in an abusive family and on an abused home planet, in the face of climate catastrophe, childhood trauma and war. These poems address difficult challenges, insisting that making art is an act of love and hope, and there are joyful lyrics celebrating the ineffable beauty of endangered species.

‘A kaleidoscopic menagerie of creatures, both heavenly and demonic, await the reader in Pascale Petit’s astonishing collection Beast.  [...] This is a collection of many skins, pelts, furs, wings, as Petit finds strange sanctuary in the quotidian violence of the skies and sea. Bodies are pierced, bruised, bloodied, yet it is Petit’s plaintive assertions of hope that truly knock the breath out of her reader, ‘I am a door no one can open’.’ – Georgie Henley, Poetry Wales

Praise for Pascale Petit's poetry:

'Tiger Girl…pushes deep into the wilder places of the forest and the human heart. It shimmers with the colours of bee-eaters and flycatchers and rages at the darker regions of environmental exploitation and cruelty… alarming, mythic, beautiful…' – Alexandra Harris, chair of Forward Prize judges

‘I think this might be her best book so far because of this complexity of a family in crisis against a planet in crisis – she’s very much a poet of the environment… She has a powerful, imagistic authority over the landscape. It’s a very moving, powerful book.’ – Daljit Nagra, reviewing Tiger Girl on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row

'Family history is at the heart of Pascale Petit’s Tiger Girl, the story of her grandmother, born in Rajasthan to her father’s maid but brought up as his wife’s child....Petit is a passionate laureate of the natural world, but alive to the cruelty of human depredation...' – Aingeal Clare, The Guardian

'Petit emerges as a strong voice of and for the natural world in this dazzling collection of eco-poems that unfolds like a poetic canopy of lush, throbbing images of the forests and fauna in Central India, dappled by the memories of her grandmother, the tiger girl. She explores her multiracial roots and childhood complexities as she reimagines and reconstructs matrilineal love and loss through the face and history of her ‘tiger-gran’, tracing it in the heart of the beasts and the wild, that is fraught with the ravages of environmental cruelty.' – The Telegraph India ('Nine powerful books of poetry')

‘Pascale Petit’s Mama Amazonica powerfully twists together fantasy and experience.  Over a sustained sequence of poems, Petit transfigures her mother’s desperate and disturbed life through fabulous imagery of the rainforest and its flora and fauna, moving towards a kind of extreme, Ovidian release into metamorphosis.  It won the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize this year, a first for a book of poetry.’ – Marina Warner, The Tablet (Books of the Year 2018)

2018 Ondaatje Prize judges Tahmima Anam, Eva Hoffman and Daljit Nagra on Mama Amazonica:

'Mama Amazonica is an unforgettable read - rich with metaphor, the poems explode on the page with the multiple narratives of motherhood, illness, pain, and redemption. All of this set in a rainforest that is both mythic and vividly alive. This is a book that feels almost magical in its unlikeliness, and that for me is what made it a clear winner.’ – Tahmima Anam

‘Rarely has the personal and environmental lament found such imaginative fusion, such outlandish and shocking expression that is at once spectacularly vigorous, intimate and heartbroken.’ – Daljit Nagra

‘In Pascale Petit’s evocations, the Amazon rainforest comes alive, with human characters as much a part of nature as the creatures and plants living there – alluring and frightening, violent and vulnerable, dangerous and endangered. A feat of imaginative intensity, this is also an act of reckoning and reparation, in which deep empathy for a disturbed mother is transmuted into the exacting beauty of poetic language.’ – Eva Hoffman

Pascale Petit reads for SHE Changes Climate at COP26

Pascale Petit reads ‘Rainforest in the Sleep Room’ from Mama Amazonica and ‘Green Bee-eater’ from Tiger Girl. Film made by Brian Fraser and edited by Kit Ondaatje Rolls for a COP26 event at The Pipe Factory, Glasgow, on 9 November 2021. Photographs and videos of the Peruvian Amazon and the green bee-eater in Bandhavgarh National Park, India, by Brian Fraser and Pascale Petit. With kind permission of Kit Ondaatje Rolls.

Pascale Petit: Tiger Girl launch reading

Pascale Petit launched her new collection Tiger Girl in a Bloodaxe online launch reading shared with Wayne Holloway-Smith and Phoebe Stuckes on 8 September 2020. This video is an excerpt from that event which went out on YouTube Live.

Pascale Petit reads ‘Jungle Owlet’

Here Pascale Petit reads her poem ‘Jungle Owlet’ from Tiger Girl at the online Forward Prize for Poetry online event in October 2020.

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