The Huntress By Pascale Petit

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Pascale Petit s eighth collection of poetry Tiger Girl published by Bloodaxe in 2020 was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection and for Wales Book of the Year A poem from the book Indian Paradise Flycatcher won the Keats Shelley Poetry Prize Her seventh collection Mama ica published by Bloodaxe in 2017 won the inaugural Laurel Prize 2020 and the Royal Society of Literatures Ondaatje Prize 2018 the first time a poetry book has won this prize for a work of fiction non fiction or poetry best evoking the spirit of a place It was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018 Her sixth collection Fauverie was her fourth to be shortlisted for the T. The huntress book review S Eliot Prize A p Pascale Petit s eighth collection of poetry Tiger Girl published by Bloodaxe in 2020 was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection and for Wales Book of the Year A poem from the book Indian Paradise Flycatcher won the Keats Shelley Poetry Prize Her seventh collection Mama ica published by Bloodaxe in 2017 won the inaugural Laurel Prize 2020 and the Royal Society of Literature s Ondaatje Prize 2018 the first time a poetry book has won this prize for a work of fiction non fiction or poetry best evoking the spirit of a place It was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018 Her sixth collection Fauverie was her fourth to be shortlisted for the T. The huntress a novel S Eliot Prize A portfolio of poems from the book won the 2013 Manchester Poetry Prize Petit trained at the Royal College of Art and spent the first part of her life as a visual artist before deciding to concentrate on poetry Three of her books were Books of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement the Independent and the Observer In 2004 the Poetry Book Society selected Petit as one of the Next Generation Poets She is widely travelled including in India Mexico and the Venezuelan and Peruvian Website site_link Blog site_link Rarely has the personal and environmental lament found such imaginative fusion such outlandish and shocking expression that is at once spectacularly vigorous intimate and heartbroken Daljit Nagra judge for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2018 Beautifully sad the imagery inexhaustible the sorrow and torment both tempered and sharpened by the relish for language and the ingenuity of the imagination Simon Armitage on Mama ica This is a major literary feat and this a brilliant sequence of poems It burns in its own supranatural light Tim Liardet Vona Groarke Poetry Book Society Bulletin Radiant and viscerally evocative this image confirms the value of Petit s work in Mama ica to make poems that are as radical as they are necessary because they enable us to see in new ways Alice Hiller The Poetry Review Pascale Petit s Fauverie is astonishing one of those books that breaks new ground in how to approach writing about the unwritable Ruth Padel London Review Bookshop Books of the Year Pascale s poems are as fresh as paint and make you look all over again at Frida and her brilliant and tragic life Jackie Kay Books of the Year Observer a hard hitting palette knife evocation of the effect that bus crash had on Kahlo s life and work exploring the way trauma hurts an artist into creation Ruth Padel The Guardian site_link 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 The HuntressIt is better if I do not speak If I speak I am in big trouble Poetry Literature Fiction Art I saw Pascale Petit speak at a nature conference last year and enjoyed her poetry reading very much I don t think this was the best collection of hers to pick up first though Almost every poem is about her difficult relationship with her mother who is likened to a serpent a praying mantis or the huntress of the title There are echoes of mythology and Aztec legend I found the overall emotional and metaphorical palette to be so limited as to make the book feel repetitive The orchid poems especially The Ghost Orchid are perhaps the most interesting. Hunter of huntresses novel But she was my motheras much a victim as a devourer from Portrait of My Mother as Coatlicue Poetry Literature Fiction Art The idea of lineage is also present in Petit s The Huntress which juxtaposes colonial violence and gender conflict Some critics have made the mistake of thinking that Petit s The Huntress is set amongst the flora and fauna of the but drawing on Aztec myths of blood sacrifice The Huntress uses a Mexican setting few realise that Mexico contains its own rainforest. Analysis of the huntress Reviewers can be forgiven for missing this point since Petit s earlier collection The Zoo Father was set in the Like The Zoo Father The Huntress represents confrontation with an abusive parent but here it is the mother The narrative of La Llorona is at the heart of the collection as the daughter narrator uses Aztec mythologies as a means to communicate and understand The initial reception of Petit s collection has been somewhat preoccupied by the intense anger directed at the mother In At the Gate of Secrets the narrator tells how she will only be reconciled with her mother in the grave where we will torment one another Yet in other poems such as The Rattlesnake Mother the daughter states I think now how hard it was for her to be a rattlesnake Petit s poetry is designed to subvert readers expectations about female relationships and there will never be a Hollywood ending with saccharine tears and reconciliation Sometimes Petit s subversiveness can seem inflammatory such as in Portrait of my Mother as Coatlicue Like Cortes I found her monstrousand would have preferredto bury her in the cathedral crypt. The huntresses 2014 cast Coatlicue is a monstrous mother goddess who in Aztec mythology wore a Medusa like skirt of snakes The daughter views Coatlicue with anxiety reminiscent of male fears about the female body and sexual appetite In mentioning Cortez Petit makes the connection here between the female body and the Orientalist view of other cultures the exotic and sinister Aztec temples become the foundations for Roman Catholic cathedrals just as the female body is appropriated to create a patriarchal lineage What is so unnerving about this poem is Petit s positioning of her daughter narrator as Cortes the coloniser and it is problematic to consider where this comparison leads Yet the narrator relents stating But she was my mother as much a victim as a devourer As in The Zen of La Llorona the narrator of The Huntress comes to recognise that her mother s violence and cruelty are inherited from her own experiences of pain One of the most powerful poems Lunettes creates a chain of association that begins with her father s glasses in the moonlight working its way through image after imager until Petit finds an explicit motif for men s brutality and women s pain a forked iron plate into which the stock of a field gun carriage is inserted. The huntress book review Link Poetry Literature Fiction Art Astonashing and lush Pascale is one of my favourite poets This is the third collection I ve read I read Mama ica first and then went on to read Fauverie soon after and now The Huntress. Huntress edr pdf An earthy yet dream like forest of emotions centred on her complex and tragic relationship with her mother Pascale uses lyrical prose and animal like personalities to express the intensity of a little girl walking through the wilderness the jungle of her mother s mental illness In one poem her mother is a rattlesnake in another she s a white stag and in another she s a wasp or a praying mantis. PDF The huntress agent Favorite lines I found her monstrousand would have preferred to bury her in the cathedral crypt. Ebook hunter website These poems are mystical yet grounded in earthly trauma of surviving deep wounds Poetry Literature Fiction Art