I still remember the first time I read a book that changed a boring school activity into an exciting experience of words capable of transporting me to another world. This happened to me as I read a poem by Pascale Petit. Her words were alive, pulsing and captivated me to enter into the rich world she has opened to her readers with her poetry and I wished for it not to stop so I went on to explore the rest of her work. She writes poetry with clear and concise language and form and with a keen knack for setting dramatic effects.
She describes her creative process as that of “total immersion and is at her most happiest with her poems when her lines emerge from trance-like state.” Petit's vivid poetry transports the readers with her and they see what she sees.
Our left side hemispheres demand categorizations and she had been given labels as a poet of magical realism and fierce confessionals. So who is this magician of striking and lyrical works?
Pascale Petit was born in Paris in 1953 and decided to become an artist and a poet in her childhood, which she had spent alternately in France and Wales. She followed her artistic aspiration when she trained as a sculptor at Gloucestershire College of Art and ten years later did an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art. She had many successful exhibitions and took part in the women’s art movement, she also wrote poems and short fiction.
Petit alternated between being a sculptor and a writer as she found each form absorbing and wanted to commit herself to each art form wholly. Now she has devoted herself fully to poetry and writing, but her sculpting gives her work an extra dimension as her poems have a feel of precise structure and attention to visual details.
Currently Pascale Petit is the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Middlesex University and tutors for Oxford University and Tate Modern. Her poetry has been translated into fifteen languages worldwide and she is an ambassador of poetry in English abroad. She has travelled extensively to California, Venezuelan Amazon, Nepal, China, Kazakhstan and Israel. Some of these journeys were funded by the Arts Council England. She draws from these journeys with an exceptional ability to introduce these lands with clarity, a sense of mythical mystery and vivid fluidity of imagery and transposes this as metaphors to express her ideas, insights and feelings. A good portion of her work concerns her complicated childhood and the complex relationships both to her father and mother. She was also Poetry Editor of Poetry London for fifteen years.
The influences on her poetry are wide - work of several painters, in particular that of Frida Kahlo, but also Franz Marc to name a couple; memories of working in her grandmother’s garden, her passion for the natural world and her deep impression of seeing a photo of Angel Falls (she says that “she became obsessed with it” after seeing a picture of it), the rainforests and the ethereal table-mountains of the Amazonian Lost World among others.
Her poetry’s close connection to nature draws some connections with Ted Hughes. Whilst his poetic connection to nature is fiery in feel - he wants to possess, grasp and hold nature, Petit’s connection is explorative and embracing like the vast body of water. Although there is an elemental difference, we feel the tangibly passionate bond throughout her work as much as in the poetry of Hughes.
Pascale Petit’s first collection ‘Heart of a deer’ came out in 1998. Petit has “a keen interest in altered states of being” and her poems show an uncanny sense of a poet as the visionary who transforms memories of marriage and childhood through the rich trail of her travels through Venezuela, California, Tibet and the country of her origin, France. The collection includes two of her longer poems - ‘Eisriesenwelt’ the ice mother and ‘Kanaima’, both of which have won her prizes from the literary establishment.
We can witness some of her craft’s greatest gifts in this collection, showing great promise of the collections to come. These gifts are the original and striking metaphoric use of nature, its landscape, plants and animal world to deliver thought in surprising and unexpected ways.
In ‘My mother’s clothes’, she recollects her mother’s clothes and connects them to memories with subtlety, beauty and ease. At the same time in ‘If I Were Winter Itself’, she conveys just how much courage she needed to go and see her mother in a hospital and how she was finally able to say all those unsaid things she had had to carry around with her. She uses images such as drinking from mythical Lethe and flask from mother of the Muses - Mnemosyne (swallowing sips from flasks as shafts of sunlight) to show what she will have to draw on to obtain her courage to confront and seek resolution, into this she weaves images of mundane life - a hospital porter and then immediately we are in the other dimension of reality again as he rubs fox-fire for the courage to proceed, the poet remembering
‘blue branches with old wounds as leaves,
red trees with raptor-roots.’
In ‘Skins’ she recollects warm emotions towards her grandmother via sewing skins as her grandmother spirit. We get a sense that this lady provided her with solace and refuge. This warm tone sustains many other beautiful poems in this collection together with great use of language when she recollects nature and its close connection to life.
Before her next collection, The Zoo Father (released 2001), she had returned to the Amazon. The experience of Amazonian tribes is woven richly into this powerful second collection, where she uses rituals for instance shrinking her Father’s head (‘Trophy’) as practiced by the Shuar/Jivaro tribes. She uses this metaphor so as to lessen the power her father had held over her. However strange such practice may seem to perceptions of our culture, this poem serves as a liberation from the oppressive wounded memories of her father’s transgression against her - she recollects his abuse in several other poems (for example ‘The Magma Room’) and his brutal treatment of her mother, which she recollects in others (‘Self-Portrait as a Were-Jaguar’). She again uses metaphors of nature with such subtle power that she makes the reader feel the emotional atmosphere and its chills, and whether one had experienced such transgressions in their lives or not, after reading this collection, she makes it known exactly what it is like. Since these experiences are often confined to silence imposed by social taboo, it is not just courageous, but very much needed, important work - she is giving voice to countless, silenced women.
Each poem in the collection seems to be connected to the other, the linking thread seems to be the need to understand the polarity between what she had wanted her father to be and who he truly was, so as to come to terms with it and to transform and transcend the harsh truth. This polarity of idolisation of the father to the reality of his being is best represented in a poem entitled ‘Hummingbird’:
“When I was a child, I wanted you, Father,
To be a harpy eagle.”
She craved protection:
“I wanted monkeys to be scared of you
They’d plummet to the ground
At the merest shadow.”
She craved nourishment:
“I waited for you to tear a sloth
From his branch and bring him to me,
Rip off his limbs so I might eat,”
So his care would give her “nine foot wingspan”.
But the Father is only a hummingbird, which will not yield what she wants (memories to understand).
Petit effortlessly mixes lyrical with the modern, strong language, throughout; she takes the reader to witness her as she sits by her dying father and recollects in each poem a different aspect of him, his past, the past with her mother and herself, we experience the whole range of emotions, it is deeply emotive in every aspect of the word. Finally in the last part ‘The Vineyard’, where she writes about her mother and the vineyard, the ‘last piece of wild land’, a gift of sorts as she recollects it in her first poem ‘A Parcel of Land’.
The last part of The Zoo Father gives the reader a taste of Petit’s next collection, The Huntress, released in 2005. This collection, the author mentions, was much harder for her to write. The intensity in this collection indeed rises. Petit’s poems in The Huntress possess chant-like rhythm, she transports her mother through metaphors of various animals - from an afflicted horse to a praying mantis - as well as Aztec deities.
She speaks out about her mother’s mental illness and emotional coldness, the way she appears terrifying and overpowering to her daughter - all this and more, we witness these scenes as if we held our breaths thanks to the power of her imagery and voice. The way she paces the tension is another element that gives this collection its strength and impact.
Although the fear of the mother’s unpredictability comes through vividly, we get a sense of this girl as strong, a survivor, we also see her tendencies to protect her brother as well as her own vulnerability. From the poem, entitled ‘The Dragonfly Daughter’, we get a sense that art, especially writing, empowers her, her pencil is darting as
“I drew the water’s wings,
the windows within windows,
the water leaves, the sun leaves.
I felt the stream and sunlight in my veins,
the wings in my blood.”
So at the end, the poet overcomes the disempowering effect her mother has on her with:
“I sewed her lips and eyelids together
with my dragonfly needle”.
For in the silence the wounds may heal. It is a very powerful, honest collection that is memorable not just for the intense content, but for the fact of the underlying compassion and the need for transformation, seeking truth and its understanding.
Although academia looks at confessional poetry with suspicion, I suggest that confessional poetry is important to the healing of the collective human psyche. What is unexpressed festers in the individual psyche, as well as the collective one. Not only do the authors of confessional poetry heal this wound by being outspoken and giving voice to the voiceless, they widen the reach of poetry deeper into the public. In the age when poetry seems to go underground, it is this ability that may keep poetry alive to remain actual (almost mainstream) and in readership. In the downward look of the academia we can also detect class issues, the upper British classes’ preference for emotional coldness and reserve and its suspicion of anything that stirs it.
“The Wounded Deer, Fourteen poems after Frida Kahlo” was published the same year as The Huntress. The collection is published in a pamphlet form. As the title suggests, we find here fourteen poems, in which the poet adopts the voice of Mexican painter, Frida Kahlo and explores subjects like sex in a refreshingly honest way. She also tackles the subject of pain and mixes it with profound beauty just as Kahlo did in her paintings. Petit with her beautiful poetry does much justice to the artist. Even if the reader had not seen her works and knows nothing of her and her life, this collection is a great introduction, the reader gets a real sense of who Frida Kahlo was and what her work represents.
This year, Pascale Petit released The Treekeeper’s Tale. Here she invokes the atmosphere of Californian Redwoods. This journey is rich and colourful, she takes us even to experience the quality of silence in ‘A Dawn’s Trail’, she also makes a point of the pre-language stage as something more natural and sacred. Considering the psychological insight that we have created language out of survivalist fears, she may have a very valid point. There’s also an underlying theme of flying, from which we get a sense of liberation, weightlessness. In the second part of this book, ‘Afterlives’, where she uses historical images of the countries she has visited - China, Nepal and Kazakhstan - expressed in stirring, rich poems, which she delivers with sharp precision of language. In the next part, ‘War Horse’, she uses paintings of Franz Marc (the German expressionist painter) as metaphors for the fate of Europe in World War One. The last part, ‘The Chrysanthemum Lantern’ is comprised of her wonderful translations from Chinese originals, which she makes colourful and sensitive all at once.
Her next collection is planned for next autumn. It will be called “The Thorn Necklace - Forty poems after Frida Kahlo”, an enhanced, full version of The Wounded Deer. It will contain 26 new poems and she titles her poems after Kahlo’s paintings while the collection will include illustrations of them as well. She is presently working on a novel in the spirit of The Zoo Father collection.
Petit’s The Zoo Father and The Huntress were both short listed for the T.S. Eliot prize, The Wounded Deer was a prize-winning pamphlet and she was selected as one of the Next Generation Poets. She was and is widely published in literary journals and has been granted many awards (new London Writer’s Award to name one). Les Murray lists her as one of the best current British poets. Her work’s stunning richness, beautiful crafting of language, their strength and empowering sense upon the reader’s mind all suggest that she deserves all these accolades and more.
Petra Whiteley
Sources of quotes
“She describes her creative process as that of total immersion and is at her most happiest with her poems when her lines emerge from trance-like state” & “Petit has a keen interest in altered states of being (though she does not choose the chemical way of their induction)” are quoted from the interviews of Pascale Petit by Valerie Mejer for El Petit Journal, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, 2005
“She says she became obsessed with it...” is quoted from Interview of Pascale Petit by Zoë Brigley, 2006
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