Pascale Petit

About me:

A French/Welsh poet living in the UK. Her fourth collection The Treekeeper's Tale was published by Seren November 2008. A fifth collection, What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo is due June 2010. Her second and third collections, The Huntress and The Zoo Father, were both shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and were Books of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement. Pascale has been selected as one of the Next Generation Poets.

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Chateau Ventenac poetry course with Pascale Petit October 11-17 2009

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Pascale was Poetry Editor of Poetry London for 15 years. She has also published a prizewinning pamphlet The Wounded Deer – Fourteen poems after Frida Kahlo. "No other British poet I am aware of can match the powerful mythic imagination of Pascale Petit." Les Murray – Times Literary Supplement.

www.pascalepetit.co.uk

http://www.pascalepetit.blogspot.com

The Second Husband

After what feels like two thousand years
I find you under the permafrost.
I dig and dig until your twelve frozen horses
spring up in their red felt masks and ibex horns.
You must have ridden each one to heaven

in your high headdress with its gold foil frieze
of Celestial Mountains, your crest
of winged snow leopards and antlered wolves
with eagle tines. When you ask me to stay
I know this is the afterlife.

The Treekeeper's Tale

I have set up house in the hollow trunk of a giant redwood.
My bed is a mat of pine needles. Cones drop their spirals

on my face as I sleep. I have the usual flying dreams.
But all I know when I wake is that this bark is my vessel

as I hurtle through space. Once, I was rocked in a cradle
carved from a coast redwood, its lullabies were my coracle.

I searched for that singing grove and became its guardian.
There are days when the wind plays each tree

like a new instrument in the forest-orchestra.
On wild nights mine is a flute. After years of solitude

I have started to hear its song. I lie staring at the stars
until the growth rings enclose me in hoops –

choirs of concentric colours, as if my tree is remembering
the music of the spheres. And I almost remember speaking

my first word, how it flew out of my mouth like a dove.
I have forgotten how another of my kind sounds.

Chandelier-Tree

I find myself staring at the spaces between
fronds, where pure blue plumes appear,
the air painting itself on my eye.

And I see how the trunk doesn’t end
where a person can climb, but continues
to the redwood’s true crown, sky-feathers

piercing the stratosphere, blue forest
on blue, some white with lace frills
of finest cirrus, before the wide canopy

of night, its invisible leaves
suddenly alert with stars – how they are
glimpses of the tree of light.

Pascale has received four major awards from Arts Council England. The Zoo Father was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and a Book of the Year in The Independent. It won an Arts Council of England Writers’ Award, a New London Writers’ Award and a poem from the book was shortlisted for a Forward Prize. A Spanish/English edition is published in Mexico and distributed in Latin America and Spain. A prizewinning pamphlet The Wounded Deer – Fourteen poems after Frida Kahlo (Smith Doorstop) appeared in 2005. Her first collection, Heart of a Deer, was published by Enitharmon in 1998.

She guest edited the Kathmandu based journal Pratik – the Contemporary British Poetry Issue in 2007 and co-edited the first anthology from The Poetry School, Tying the Song (Enitharmon, 2000). Her poems have been translated into 15 languages. She was Poetry Editor of Poetry London from 1989 to 2005, and is a co-founding tutor of The Poetry School. She tutors for Oxford University, Tate Modern, Arvon Foundation, Taliesin Trust, The Poetry School, and is currently the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Middlesex University.

Pascale is widely travelled, extensively in the Venezuelan Amazon. She recently went to Kazakhstan for the British Council and took part in the Yellow Mountain poetry festival in China. She was originally a sculptor and trained at the Royal College of Art.