Shortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection
Shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year
Tiger Girl (Bloodaxe, 2020)
A poem from the book, ‘Indian Paradise Flycatcher’, won the 2020 Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize
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.
‘I think this might be her best book so far because of this complexity of a family in crisis against a planet in crisis – she’s very much a poet of the environment… She has a powerful, imagistic authority over the landscape. It’s a very moving, powerful book.’ – Daljit Nagra, reviewing Tiger Girl on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row
‘Petit is a passionate laureate of the natural world, but alive to the cruelty of human depredation…’ – Aingeal Clare, The Guardian
‘Tiger Girl is published by Bloodaxe. It pushes deep into the wilder places of the forest and the human heart. It shimmers with the colours of bee-eaters and flycatchers and rages at the darker regions of environmental exploitation and cruelty… the shortlisted poets: Pascale Petit, for the alarming, mythic, beautiful Tiger Girl.’ – Alexandra Harris, Chair of Judges, Forward Prize for Best Collection
‘Petit’s search for human heritage in the Indian jungles could not come at a better moment… Tiger Girl’s poems, like ‘hymns that burn/at the centre of the earth’, are incantations and lamentations, conjuring lost animal spirits and a world in flames, but also constitute recovery, providing tenderness and beauty in the face of trauma.’ – Natalie Perman, Oxford Review of Books
‘… Petit succeeds in bringing to us a collection at once personal and universal, terrifying and transcendent, gory and gorgeous. She opens our eyes to beauty and death, fires and stars, transfixes us, and thereby transforms us. Tiger Girl is mandatory reading.’ – Skendha Singh, DURA (Dundee University Review of the Arts)
‘Throughout the pages of Tiger Girl, Pascale Petit casts her beloved grandmother’s history as parallel to the planet’s, and with the twin voices of memory and prophecy pays tribute to those two true mothers of her childhood: the Earth and tiger-girl. This volume rests upon critical borderlands, all of which manifest within the body of Petit’s grandmother. She stands poached, skinned, triumphant, and abandoned; she mirrors the Earth itself in her vitality and endurance. Through Petit’s devoted immortalization, we are made witness to a tigress tender enough to cradle the planet, as it has midwifed her.’ – Florinda, amberflora magazine
‘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…This mesmerizing collection is full of delights.’ – Publishers Weekly [on Tiger Girl]
‘No one in these islands writes poems like Pascale Petit. Part of this is formal: Petit trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art in her youth, and didn’t publish her first full poetry collection until 1998, in her mid-forties. Her poems bear out this history in their tactility, their keen awareness of space, their density of colour and hyperreal imagery. My only experiential comparison is walking into a room in a gallery, in which every surface has been transformed: often unsettling, often unsettlingly familiar, a lucid, vivid dream.’ – Dave Coates, Versopolis, introducing an interview with Pascale Petit
‘This poem has an elegant form and distinctive imagery which convey and celebrate a bird native to Central Asia in a contemporary ode that really doesn’t put a foot wrong from start to finish. And the poem asks us to think about this bird in relation to time, as observations become part of a subtle comment on the fragility and resilience of the natural world against a backdrop of the impacts of climate change.’ – Judge Will Kemp on ‘Indian Paradise Flycatcher’, winner of the 2020 Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize (a poem from Tiger Girl).
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.
‘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)
‘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 Amazonica
