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Synopsis
This short collection is written in the voice of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo who led a wild and troubled life. She had polio as a child, and aged eighteen suffered a serious accident which caused her constant pain. She was married to the muralist Diego Rivera and their relationship was stormy but loving. Her fierce and vibrant paintings include many self-portraits. Pascale Petit has published three full length collections, and was selected by the PBS in 2004 as a Next Generation Poet. This collection was a first stage winner in The Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition 2004 'Pascale Petit is among five or six of the very best current poets of the UK.' - Les Murray 'Our eyes are opened to the abundance and colour of the world, and that world seems remade as a life-giving habitat for the imagination.' - Kathleen Jamie and Maurice Riordan, PBS Bulletin SAMPLE POEM: Self-Portrait with Monkey and Parrot I who painted this with brushes of flame cannot tell you where I have been this morning. But I can't silence Bonito. He perches just below my left ear, repeating sounds he learnt from the sun, when he flew into its core. Fulang-Chang went with him, swinging through the canopies of fire forests, searching for the tree that burns at the centre of my life. These gold leaves are the few he brought back - they still hum many years after my body has cooled. And you - how long will you listen to these colours before you hear the language of light? Pascale Petit was born in Paris, grew up in France and Wales, and trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art. Shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize, her second collection The Zoo Father was a PBS Recommendation. It won an Arts Council of England Writers' Award and a New London Writers' Award. A bilingual edition is published in Mexico. Her third full length collection The Huntress is published in 2005. She was selected in 2004 as one of the Next Generation Poets.
Pascale Petit's pamphlet of 14 poems in the voice of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, makes you itch to examine Kahlo's paintings… In the title poem it is the stag (featuring Kahlo's head and a hide dotted with arrows) that speaks:'Small and dainty as I am/ I escaped into this canvas'. This lifts the poem into a dimension beyond the biographical, referring to the Aztec idea of the animal as alter-ego … In the final poem – 'Self Portrait with Dog and Sun' – Petit finds a voice that speaks with clarity and confidence: 'Threaded through my hair, … are silk ribbons –/ their greens and reds barking / as only paint can,/happy as a dog with its mistress.' This is the kind of voice that might come from an extraordinary woman who revels in the assured quality of her own unique work.
Janet Phillips
Have you read The Wounded Deer by Pascale Petit? - Add your own review
