The Writers of Wales Database

PETIT, PASCALE

26 Clacton Road, London, E17 8AR
Tel: 020 85206693
Email: pascalepetit@btinternet.com
Website: http://www.pascalepetit.co.uk/
Audiovisual footage available here and here
 
Pascale Petit was born in Paris, grew up in France and Wales and lives in London. In 2004 the Poetry Book Society and Arts Council named her as one of the Next Generation Poets. She has published five full-length poetry collections. The Zoo Father (Seren, 2001) and The Huntress (Seren, 2005), were both short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize and were also Books of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement. Pascale has also had Books of the Year in the Independent and Observer. The Zoo Father was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and a Book of the Year in the Independent. It won a major Arts Council of England Writers’ Award and a New London Writers’ Award. A poem from the book was also shortlisted for a Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. A Spanish/English bilingual edition is published in Mexico and she co–edited the first anthology from The Poetry School, Tying the Song (Enitharmon, 2000). A prizewinning pamphlet The Wounded Deer – Fourteen poems after Frida Kahlo (Smith Doorstop) also appeared in 2005.

She hosted the Guardian’s Poetry Workshop in June 2006. Her poems have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 4, and published in journals in the UK, the US and Australia; including Poetry Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry Wales and Quadrant. They have been translated into Bulgarian, Chinese, Lithuanian, Spanish, Farsi, Japanese, Portuguese, German, Dutch and Romanian. Pascale Petit has travelled extensively in the Venezuelan Amazon and originally trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art. She was a co-founder of Poetry London, its Poetry Editor from 1989 to 2005, and is a founding tutor of The Poetry School. In 2004 she was selected as one of the ten best new women poets of the decade by Mslexia magazine. In 2005 she won an Arts Council of England award to take part in the Poet to Poet translation project in China and Scotland, translating poems by Yang Lian, Zhai Yong Ming, and Zhou Zan. She has given readings nationally and internationally, including at the Tampico International Literature Festival in Mexico, Lithuania, US, and at numerous UK venues including Tate Modern, Bloomsbury Theatre, the Royal Festival Hall, Ways With Words and the Hay Festival.

Pascale was awarded a Grant for the Arts award from Arts Council England, London, and a grant from the Author’s Foundation, to complete two collections: The Treekeeper’s Tale (2008) and What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo (2010), both published by Seren. The awards were to buy time and travel to Nepal for research. Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo (Seren, 2010) was shortlisted for the T.S Eliot Prize 2010, was a Book of the Year in The Observer and was on the 2011 Wales Book of the Year Short List. Click here for more information. Pascale is a Member of The Welsh Academy.

The photograph of Pascale displayed above is credited to Kitty Sullivan.

Reviews:

"…No other British poet I am aware of can match the powerful mythic imagination of Pascale Petit. The mother figure in her new collection The Huntress (Seren, 2005) appears as a ghost orchid, a rattlesnake, as geological forms and feathered Amerindian goddesses, all deeply imagined in perfect dreamlight focus. Baroque sinuosity seems a matter of fevered family relations, with a haunting mystical quality interfused…"
Les Murray, Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year

“…A blazing new arrival…”
Boyd Tonkin, The Independent Books of the Year

 "…A brave and unsettling collection. These are psychological explorations of relationships and power struggles that take risks…"
Robyn Bolam, Poetry Review

"…Pascale Petit’s Larzac is one of the most powerfully imaginative and easily recognisable territories created in recent writing from the UK…"
Robert Minhinnick, Poetry London


Selected Publications:
Icefall Climbing (Smith/Doorstep Books, 1994)
Heart of a Deer (Enitharmon, 1998)
The Zoo Father (Seren, 2001)
El Padre Zoológico / The Zoo Father (a bilingual edition published in Mexico) (El Toucan, 2004)
The Huntress (Seren, 2005)
The Wounded Deer: Fourteen Poems After Frida Kahlo (Smith/Doorstep Books, 2005)
The Treekeeper’s Tale (Seren, 2008)
What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo (Seren, 2010)

Contributed to:
Tying the Song (co-editor) (Enitharmon, 2000)
Pendulum: The Poetry of Dreams (contributor) (Avalanche, 2008)

 

The Zoo Father (Seren, 2001)

At the dark heart of this unique collection is a daughter’s fraught relationship with her dying father, a man whose legacy to her was violence and abandonment. Rich in the imagery of the Amazonian jungle (fire ants, shaman masks, hummingbirds, shrunken heads, jaguars) these poems at once ward off and redeem the father through myriad transformations. These intense, vibrant and fiercely felt poems are sure to evoke strong responses in readers.

To purchase this title from gwales.com, please click on its front cover


The Huntress (Seren, 2005)

In this emotional follow-up to the highly acclaimed The Zoo Father, a daughter is haunted by her mentally ill mother, and a painful childhood is re-imagined through a series of remarkable and passionate transformations. The feared mother is a rattlesnake, an Aztec goddess,a Tibetan singing bowl, a stalagmite, a praying mantis, a ghost orchid. She is also seen as a nine-year-old child in a lunatic asylum. These culminate in a long central poem ’At the Gate of Secrets’ where the daughter escapes her huntress as a cosmic stag: "Every second I rise back up / to run deeper into the forest, / through the root-doors / and light-rings of night, / away from your arrows, my huntress." Underlying these poems is an intense mystical vision that lifts the dark material of the subject matter above the merely personal.

To purchase this title from gwales.com, please click on its front cover


The Treekeeper’s Tale (Seren, 2008)

Already well known for the fierce confessional imagery of her first three books, The Treekeeper’s Tale points towards another facet of the poet’s gift, an intense feeling for the natural world, allied with a personal response to historical incidents and to other lands. The title section of this four-part collection adopts the giant coast redwood trees in California as a particular talisman. Lyrical, resonant, strange and imaginative, these poems echo in the mind and leave an indelible impression of the mysterious atmosphere of the redwood forests. The second section, ‘Afterlives’, takes us on journeys to the past, as in the burial of a Siberian priestess, and on trips to other places including China, Nepal and Kazakhstan. The colourful paintings of the German expressionist Franz Marc, such as the famous red and blue horses series, provide the key to the third section, War Horse, where dramatic imagery of the horses blends and contrasts with the tragic fate of Europe during World War One. The final part, ‘The Chrysanthemum Lantern’, features sensitive translations from Chinese originals.

To purchase this title from gwales.com, please click on its front cover
 

What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo (Seren, 2010)

The poems in this collection are spoken in the voice of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and bear the titles of her paintings. A few sequences, such as the title poem 'What the Water Gave Me', represent one painting over several poems and are woven through the book.

To purchase this title from gwales.com, please click on its front cover






 

Eligible Writers on Tour subjects offered:

1. Readings from own poetry, discussions or interviews
2. Reading from essays
3. Creative writing workshops in poetry
4. Talks on editing and publishing poetry

AGE RANGE: older secondary school, and undergraduate to adult
SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS: non-car-driver