Tiger Girl

by Pascale Petit

Overview

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 her tales of wild tigers, but she’s also the endangered predators Petit encountered in Central India. In exuberant and tender ecopoems, the saving grace of love in an otherwise bleak childhood is celebrated through spellbinding visions of nature, alongside haunting images of poaching and species extinction. Tiger Girl is Pascale Petit’s eighth collection, and her second from Bloodaxe, following Mama Amazonica, winner of the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize 2018 – the first time a poetry book won this prize for a work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry best evoking the spirit of a place. Four of her earlier collections were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781780375267
Publisher:	Bloodaxe Books
Publication date:	11/03/2020
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Pascale Petit was born in Paris, grew up in France and Wales and lives in Cornwall. She is of French/Welsh/Indian heritage. Her seventh collection, Mama Amazonica (Bloodaxe Books, 2017) was Poetry Book Society Choice for Autumn 2017, was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018 and won the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2018. Her eighth collection, Tiger Girl, is due from Bloodaxe in 2020. She published six previous poetry collections. Her sixth, Fauverie (Seren, 2014), was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her fifth collection, What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo, published by Seren in 2010 (UK) and Black Lawrence Press in 2011 (US), was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot Prize, Wales Book of the Year, and was Jackie Kay's Book of the Year in the Observer. Two of her previous books, The Zoo Father and The Huntress, were also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and were Books of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement and Independent. She was Poetry Editor of Poetry London from 1989 to 2005 and is a co-founding tutor of The Poetry School. Her poems have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 4, The Poetry Archive and ABC Radio National, and published widely in journals around the world, including in Poetry, Poetry Review, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares and Quadrant. They have been translated into 18 languages. She taught popular poetry courses in the galleries at Tate Modern for nine years, and currently tutors for the Arvon Foundation and Ty Newydd. She was the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art 2011-12.

Table of Contents

Her Gypsy Clothes 11

The Umbrella Stand 13

In the Forest 15

Green Bee-eater 22

Surprised! 24

My Mugger Crib 25

Her Tigress Eyes 27

Tiger Gran 28

Indian Roller 30

Her Bulbul 32

When I was eight my father visited and we went fishing 33

Mongoose Brushes 34

Chital Girl 35

Pump 37

Her Globe 38

Her Mouth 40

Baghwa 41

Her Washing 44

Landscape with Vultures 45

Her Half Indian Back 47

Flash Forests 48

#ExtinctionRebelhon 50

Trees of Song 52

Her Teeth 54

Treasure Cupboard 55

A Tailorbird Nest 56

The Anthropocene 57

Snow Leopardskin Jacket 58

Grandala 59

Jungle Owlet 61

Her Glasses 63

My Velvet 64

Clouded Girl 65

My Grecian Urn 66

Indian Paradise Flycatcher 68

Wild Dogs 70

The Tiger Game 71

Nilgai 72

Prize Photograph 73

Hatha Jodi 74

Spotted Deer 76

Pangolin 77

Swamp Deer 79

Barasingha 80

Brown Fish Owl 82

Tiger Myth 84

Noor 86

Common Map 87

Passport 88

The Superb Lyrebird 90

Her Bedroom 92

Night Garden 93

Forest Guard 94

Jungle Cat 96

Mahaman's Face through Binoculars 97

For a Coming Extinction 98

Her Staircase 100

Kew Gardens 102

Her Flowers 103

Sky Ladder 104

Walking Fire 107

Acknowledgements 111

Editorial Reviews

★ 10/19/2020

The vibrant poems on animals and nature for which Petit (Mama Amazonica) is rightfully known are fully realized in this dazzling work. Petit considers her family history, her grandmother’s Indian heritage, and the folklore that fills the speaker’s mind with images of animals, night markets, and shouting vendors. Petit’s gift for luminous juxtaposition shines: “The night is black as bear fur// its muzzle bleeding after eating honey/ baited with explosives.// How many rupees for the galaxies/ in a gallbladder?” Later, in the poem “In the Forest,” she describes the hide of a creature as “arabesques of bulldozed gardens,” declaring, “If it were possible to remake the creature/ from its pelt, I would do it// but the man sold the pelt/ because his family was hungry.” Petit’s poems are rich with such dramatic turns, offering her glorious imagery momentum. “My grandmother... for whom I would weed the world,” she recollects in one of the many poems that draw their energy from the woman she describes as “a hybrid rose... her face the map of India when it’s summer,/ the map of Wales in winter.” This mesmerizing collection is full of delights. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

No one writing in English today comes anywhere near the exuberance of Pascale Petit. 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)

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