Bøker av Pascale Petit

Pascale Petit's My Hummingbird Father is a beautifully lyrical debut novel in dialogue with Pascale's Ondaatje and Laurel Prize-winning poetry collection, Mama Amazonica.

Pascale Petit's Tiger Girl marks a shift from the Amazonian rainforests of her previous work to explore her grandmother's Indian heritage and the fauna and flora of subcontinental jungles. Tiger girl is the grandmother, with tales of wild tigers, but also endangered predators Petit encountered in Central India. Shortlisted for the Forward Prize.

Mama Amazonica is set in a psychiatric ward and in the Amazon rainforest, an asylum for animals on the brink of extinction. It reveals the story of Pascale Petit's mentally ill mother and the consequences of abuse. Winner of the Laurel Prize and the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2018, Mama Amazonica is her seventh collection, and her first from Bloodaxe.

A poet known for her fierce confessional style focuses on her passion for the natural world in this startling collection of vignettes influenced by California's giant redwood trees. These lyrical, resonant, strange, and imaginative poems echo in the mind and leave an indelible impression of the mysterious atmosphere of the redwood forests. Additional poems, inspired by the colorful paintings of German expressionist Franz Marc, blend and contrast dramatic imagery of red and blue horses with the tragic fate of Europe during World War I. Woven throughout are sensitive translations of original Chinese works and odes to the beauty of the Himalayas, influenced by the author's travel experiences in China and Nepal.

Second collection from the poet of powerful emotions and vivid imagery, The Zoo Father underlines the author's reputation as a questing poet capable of outstanding imagistic flourishes and surprising associations. This extraordinary and powerful volume is comprised of two sections, the first about with the poet's relationship with her father, the second with her mother. Section One is heavily imbued with imagery of the poet's travels in South America and her researches in the cultures and ecology of the Venezuelan. Pain, anger, bewilderment are refracted through a rich, often sensual imagery of fauna, hallucinatory drugs and tribal beliefs. This gives the poems their originality, and prevents subject matter of childhood abandonment and abuse becoming too harrowing. The imagery adapted from shamanistic beliefs is especially memorable. Section Two is set in southern France, in an almost equally exotic location of vineyards and 'dinosaur plateaux'. It concerns the poet's family holidays in "the vineyard" and her rediscovery and subsequent repossession of that place. Once again, the poems delineate a primary relationship (with the poet's mother), with the lushness of the imagery putting into surprising context the development of that relationship.

In this emotional follow-up to" The Zoo Father, " a daughter is haunted by her mentally ill mother until a series of remarkable transformations help her to conquer painful childhood memories. Over the course of the collection, the feared mother becomes a rattlesnake, an Aztec goddess, a Tibetan singing bowl, a stalagmite, a praying mantis, and then a ghost orchid, yet in the central poem the daughter becomes a cosmic stag and escapes her mother-huntress.