This is one of the poems from Pascale Petit's newly published collection Fauverie, from Seren Books. Emmanuel is the big bell that hangs in the south tower of Notre Dame in Paris and the poem, like others in this collection, concerns the death of a father and the powerful pull of a great city, as well as memories that are going to 'reverberate through a life'. But things are not exactly as they seem. The Fauverie is the big cat house in the Jardin des Plantes zoo in Paris - a city portrayed in these poems as ‘savage as the Amazon’. At the centre of the collection is the big Jaguar, Aramis, beautiful, wild and dangerous in every cell of his powerful body. And there is also the poet’s father, now weak and dying, but still able to arouse turbulent emotions and painful memories. There is ambivalence and ambiguity in everything - ‘ferocity and grace’ exist side by side - the wild can be both savage and seductive. Humans are also animals. There is a direct reference, in the title of this collection, to Fauve painters who used raw colour straight from the tube and were regarded as 'the wild beasts of art'. Pascale Petit was also a visual artist and she is fascinated by the idea of ‘wild beast poetry’ that looks at the primitive and the spiritual at the same time. Fauverie follows, and references, her second collection, The Zoo Father, published 13 years ago. The poet is now less angry and more compassionate than she was when her father died, but still unflinching and much more complex. Pascale’s father is also Paris - a city that is, for the poet, both full of pain and full of joy. This is transformative poetry which comes from what Les Murray called Pascale Petit’s ‘powerful mythic imagination’. The poems are informed by a deep knowledge of art, mythology and psychology, though you don’t need to understand any of the references in order to understand the poetry. The sub-text is exactly that. But there is a keen sense of danger. Every line is liminal - you walk precariously on the edge between worlds, on the thresholds of different visions. The dictionary defines liminality as: ‘the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rituals, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the ritual is complete.’ Here Liminality is the right word, because the great beauty of these poems is the power that they have to disturb and disorientate the reader. We feel the destructive strength of Aramis, marvel at his beauty; we are pierced by the poet’s grief for her dying father, revolted by the way human beings kill and consume other animals, by the way they treat each other. Who is the predator? Who is the prey? This is poetry that is going to change the way you look at things. The collection tells a story - beginning with the arrival of a letter, ‘Never before has a letter been so heavy, growing to two metres in my room, the address, the phone number, then the numbness, I know you must be surprised, it says, but I will die soon and want to make contact.’ And then the meeting between estranged father and daughter, described in 'Kissing a Jaguar' The first meeting was like I’d had Virola snuff blown up my nostrils. Alone with my father in a room he called ‘la jungle’. Back in her hotel room the poet ‘retches all night’, but next morning is up and walking the streets of Paris All paths lead to the Fauverie and this is where I come to, again and again, to where Aramis has stars for a coat and his mouth is a sky-gate the jaguar shaman climbs through. There is incredible cruelty in the poems - a darkness that reveals childhood traumas. For me one of the most horrific poems was Pate de Foie Gras, which describes the conditions where ducks and geese are force-fed, ‘broken beaks/torn throats, maggots in neck wounds’ and spend their lives waiting in fear, but also in hunger, for the moment when the ‘gavage’ will be thrust down their throats. But the whole is constructed as a metaphor for the childhood memory of being made to eat Pate de Foie ‘part cooked, a whole lobe’; when the farmer clasps the neck of the bird, it is the small girl who is being force-fed. Much of the darkness in the poems is expressed in food - a milk fed piglet (cochon de lait) sawn in half and wrapped in cling-film for sale in the market, (Grenelle Market 1). In another, the child who has been locked in the cellar comes up for air in the food market where ‘The counters smelled of raw light/ of butchering and fiesta.’ One of the most horrific is ‘Ortolan’. Apparently Francois Mitterand’s last meal was an Ortolan and the poet imagines her father eating one before he dies, the small bird drowned in Armagnac, grilled and eaten whole. In the poem Blackbird, the poet, locked in the cellar as a punishment as a small child, is personified as a bird. Pascale Petit was born in Paris, where her mother lived, but partly brought up by her grandmother in Wales. She has always been very open about her parent’s abusive treatment, which included being locked in a cellar regularly as a punishment. The suffering of animals becomes a metaphor for the suffering of the child. In Paris the plates are piled high with ‘lambs’ tongues’, but it’s only when the poet, older now, has come to the safety of Wales that she can allow herself to ‘hear their bleats’. The connections between her childhood traumas and the preoccupation with the animals of the Fauverie, and particularly Aramis, are very clear. In Self-Portrait with King Vultures (N’Golo and Margot), there is comfort; . . . I am the Vulture-Father, I eat death, N’Golo whispers, I eat grief. The connection is more explicit in the poem Le Sang des Betes, where the poet is in a train; My carriage moves on, past the dangerous work of the mind as it sorts through memories - those that must and must not be remembered except as flashes from the train-tracks of history, or only confronted in animal form. Pascale admits the ‘element of the supernatural’ in her work, attributing it to her Welsh grandmother’s influence. This collection is further exploration of the way that childhood trauma can be transformed into art, which was so carefully probed in What the Water Gave Me - Pascale’s collection of poetry around the life and work of Frida Kahlo. Pascale, who studied at the Royal College of Art and was at first a sculptor, clearly identified with Frida’s ability to make great art out of suffering. But this is definitely not ‘art as therapy’, nor is it about taming savagery or the healing of wounds – it is the transformation of ugliness into beauty and vulnerability into power using words and images. In a recent interview (available online here) Pascale talks about her work and in particular ‘writing the personal’. (6.34 minutes in) ‘It is very hard to write personal and painful subjects in poems ... I don’t feel that I have a choice... That’s what I need to write ... I don’t think my work is just about autobiography, what I’m really interested in is investigation’ particularly ‘exploration into what we call good and evil’. Her ‘difficult’ and abusive parents gave her intense material. Travelling to the Amazon as an adult artist gave her new ways of looking at it. ‘I want to take my parents into that rainforest place . . . and try to see what there is about them that’s good and what’s bad and why and to try to make them somehow beautiful - the amazon is beautiful as well as ‘a green hell’. ‘People have an extraordinary mythology .... Putting my parents in that kind of context ... gives them a new light.’ http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.co.nz/2014/09/pascale-petit-fauverie-emmanue...

The big-cat house at the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes in Paris is the focus of Pascale Petit’s new collection, Fauverie.

Previewing the collection on her blog last year, Petit explained that the word “fauverie” also conjures “a ‘fauve’ wild beast painting, a habitat of primal colour and encagement”. This week’s poem, Caracal, comes late in the collection and forms a moment of reflection, a cool breathing space, where quiet earth colours predominate and match the elegiac tone.

The caracal (also known as the desert lynx) has a coat of “fawn-rust” that resembles the “sandy loam” of Papa’s grave. When Black Ears leaps for his steak in the third tercet “it’s like a desert doing a somersault”. The bold synthesis of the animal’s natural absence of markings and the curiously “unmarked grave” of the speaker’s father leaves much unsaid. The poem itself makes some agile leaps within its tidy framework: in stanza two, for example, the almost-taboo question of line one (“What happens to a body after fourteen years?”) is followed by a jump-cut allowing the uncomfortable equation of corpse and steak to be registered and defused almost simultaneously.

The conditional “If I am your keeper” queries a metaphor which has been asserted more robustly elsewhere: the transformation of the caracal into the father’s soul, and the speaker into the zoo keeper, is only provisional. Tact prevails, even in the delicate, pattering percussion of stanza four (“temporary” ,“tempts”, “soul”, “meal”).

“After great pain a formal feeling comes …” Emily Dickinson’s majestic poem describes numbness, the “Hour of Lead”. Petit shows a reverse psychological movement – from great pain to an hour of beautiful airy lightness, a formal feeling that’s also release. In the last line, however, the poem effects a “turn” and the unexpected goshawk, invisible but causing the air to quiver with its cries, reminds us of predation. The poem’s last word, it reinstates the carnivorous cycle of nature and art. Even the most graceful flight paths lead to the fauverie, it seems.

Caracal

Fawn-rust coat, no markings,
like the sandy loam I gathered
from your unmarked grave, Papa.

What happens to a body after fourteen years?
The keeper throws a steak
into the air and Black Ears

jumps ten feet to catch it –
it’s like a desert doing a somersault.
If I am your keeper,

the temporary owner of this plot,
let me tempt your soul
with a meal, throw it higher

than the horse chestnuts,
into the clear blue air that quivers
with the cries of a goshawk.

Carol Rumens
http://bit.ly/ZkpD2Q

Pascale Petit’s sixth collection, Fauverie, is the already award-winning follow-up to The Zoo Father; in it, childhood trauma is being transformed, the vanished father appears in stories about the Jardin des Plantes zoo in Paris, taking shape of majestic, lovable beasts, endangered species, worth forgiveness and compassion, giving consolation. Choosing this father, the right father is the poet’s voluntary act (in fact, she performs the transformation herself): ”The man with aviary – the one / sparrows follow as he shuffles along, helping him with caresses of their wings. / The one a nightingale serenades /just because he is in pain – that’s / the father I choose, not the man / who thrusts red-hot prongs in their eyes/ so their songs will carry for miles.” (Portrait of my Father as a Bird Fancier)

Paris has an important role in the book. For the poet, it’s not the nightmare place of childhood anymore but a beautiful romantic city. Her father’s city (My Father’s Wardrobe, Notre-Dame Father Speaks, My Father’s City, Emmanuel) – its secrets are his own, therefore hers as well.

They also share meals, father and daughter. Never have I read so much about food (but also about anything related to eating: appetite, swallowing, feeding times, instructions how to feed, even nausea and force-feeding) in a poetry collection.

The daughter (“my younger self”, says the poet) compares herself to a “duckling preparing / for the great migration, her liver / gorged to ten times its weight / so she can survive the flight”; pâté de foie gras makes her remember:

“I’ve seen the duck farms of the Périgord,

that each memory has a cage –

so many of them – some with broken beaks,

torn throats, maggots in neck wounds,

one with her tongue lolling from her mouth,

all of them panting in their tiny coops

below the funnels,

their heads that back off when the man

clamps his hand over their eyes

and stuffs the gavage in.”

(Pâté de Foie Gras)

Feeding is mentioned as a form of bonding, that between vultures and humans and also that between the poet and her vanished father:

“(…) I found a king vulture chick

and a keeper feeding her through a glove puppet

so she wouldn’t bond with humans.

I still feel those newborn mice in my mouth.

They squeak when Papa feeds me scraps

I’ve coaxed out of him, my beak down his throat.

I digest everything – eyes, bones, tails –

but when I sleep they climb back up.”

(Self-Portrait with King Vultures)

In the same poem:

“(…) I am the Vulture-Father,

I eat death, N’Golo whispers, I eat grief.”

Even the nuances of the relationship between the poet’s parents are shown through a metaphor of a market display:

“(…) each night she lies like a gutted fish

for Father the fishmonger. He strokes her

as if she’s a salmon on a bed of ice

that should be dead but is still twitching.”

(My Mother’s Salmon Skin Nightdress)

The daughter’s heritage is to be explored through flavours:

“We looked inside the lit-up cave

and our cheeks almost touched, as you pointed

at possible courses: venison in deer blood,

calf’s liver in cream. Blanched asparagus

for hors d’oeuvre, or twelve Bourgogne snails.

For dessert, lemon sorbet, or the pièce de résistance:

a box of petit fours.”

(Fridge)

All senses are food-bound in not-so-delicious but evocative examples of synaesthesia: “The counters smelled of raw light,/ of butchering and fiesta.” (Grenelle Market III); “the smell of half-eaten mice” (Lungs (Father Speaks)); “so as not to suck/ the flame into his mouth” (Sainte-Chapelle).

Identity can be shaped by the consumed territory: “He seems to have sucked / the whole Amazon/ into its being.” (Black Jaguar at Twilight)

The father is eating up a songbird – it’s a reference to Franҫois Mitterrand’s last meal:

“(…) He thinks

that death will be like this: a singing in the dark

then the pop of a few last bubbles, while the

olive-gold feathers of his body are plucked,

his feet snapped off. (…)

The crispy fat melts,

the bones are crunchy as hazelnuts. When

the bitter organs burst on his tongue in a bouquet

of ambrosia he can taste his entire life – heather

from the Kabylie mountains, Marseille’s salt air,

lavender from Provence – he’s flying through

his clouds to his nesting ground.”

(Ortolan)

The poem Lapin à la Moutarde is full of time shifts and juxtaposition. The daughter is asked at the dinner table to describe what feeding time at the zoo is like. She starts to talk about the snow leopard and his rabbit but suddenly her father announces the news, her mother is dead. Time leaps forward and back, the daughter’s confusion is being solved in the cluelessness of the leopard:

“There’s a reel in my head of a leopard

who doesn’t know what to do with the gift of a rabbit.

Every now and again he interrupts his circuit

and darts his face forward, startled,

then he’s back into the loop, perhaps

needing to bury his bunny for later or

take it somewhere where no one can watch him eat.”

The title of the book, Fauverie evokes the painting method of the Fauves, putting harsh colours on the canvas right from the tube. Pascale Petit’s poems are vivid, strong, rich in surrealist imagery. Trauma is being transformed into beauty, finally the vanished father can be accepted and mourned.

See the original post: http://www.ofipress.com/petitp.htm

For an indepth review of Fauverie by Dave Coates on the Dave Poems website follow this link: https://davepoems.wordpress.com/2015/02/04/pascale-petit-fauverie/