Books Books
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 64
ISBN: 9781854113962
Publication date: May 20, 2005
Price: £7.99
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 64
ISBN: 9781781720455
Publication date: May 20, 2005
Price: £6.39
Out of stock
Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
An outstanding volume from Pascale Petit, follow-up to the best-selling The Zoo Father.
Pascale Petit’s last collection, The Zoo Father, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes, and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She was selected as one of the Poetry Society’s Next Generation Poets.
In Pascale Petit’s highly-charged third collection, 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. These culminate in a long central poem where the daughter escapes her huntress as a cosmic stag. Underlying these poems is an intense mystical vision that lifts the dark material of the subject matter above the merely personal.
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.
