Books Books
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781854114716
Publication date: October 18, 2008
Price: £9.99
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781854116185
Publication date: October 18, 2008
Price: £6.39
Out of stock
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.
“No other British poet I am aware of can match the powerful mythic imagination of Pascale Petit.” Les Murray, TLS Books of the Year
“She operates a glittery, concise, deeply responsible magic realism, which explores the exotic, the wilderness and the faraway scrupulously for their own sake, but also as leaping metaphors for the relationships of home. Ruth Padel, Independent on Sunday
Listen to Pascale Petit read her poem, ‘Chandelier-Tree’:
Pascale Petit
Pascale Petit was born in Paris, grew up in France and Wales and lives in Cornwall. She is of French, Welsh and Indian heritage. She has published eight collections of poetry, five of which are published by Seren. Her eighth collection, Tiger Girl (Bloodaxe, 2020), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize and for Wales Book of the Year. Her seventh, Mama Amazonica (Bloodaxe, 2017), won the inaugural Laurel Prize, the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the Roehampton Prize.
Four previous collections were shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize, including her sixth Fauverie. Five poems from it won the 2013 Manchester Poetry Prize. A bilingual edition is published by Le Castor Astral in France, and a Serbian translation is published in Belgrade. Her fifth collection What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo was shortlisted for both the TS Eliot Prize and Wales Book of the Year. This book has gone into a number of reprintings and was Jackie Kay’s Book of the Year in the Observer. Black Lawrence Press published a US edition in 2011. Many of Pascale’s collections have been Books of the Year, including in the Times Literary Supplement, The Observer, and The Independent. Her second collection The Zoo Father was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was published in Mexico and Serbia. A poem from it was shortlisted for a Forward Prize. Her Selected Poems are published in China.
In 2004 the Poetry Book Society selected Pascale as one of the Next Generation Poets. In 2013 she was shortlisted for the Medicine Unboxed Creative Prize. She has won numerous awards, including five from Arts Council England, and regularly appears in major festivals. She trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art and was a visual artist for the first part of her life. Pascale is widely travelled, including in the Venezuelan and Peruvian Amazon, China and India. She has worked as Poetry Editor for Poetry London, was a co-founder of The Poetry School, and is a Royal Society of Literature Fellow.
Visit Pascale’s blog www.pascalepetit.blogspot.com
Author photo by Derrick Kakembo.
