Wow! eBook
The Zoo Father
Author(s): Pascale Petit (Author)
- Publisher: Seren
- Publication Date: 19 Sept. 2001
- Language: English
- Print length: 72 pages
- ISBN-10: 1854113054
- ISBN-13: 9781854113054
Book Description
At the dark heart of this unique collection is a daughter’s fraught relationship with her dying father, a man whose legacy to her was violence and abandonment. Rich in the imagery of the Amazonian jungle (fire ants, shaman masks, hummingbirds, shrunken heads,jaguars) these poems at once ward off and redeem the father through myriad transformations. These intense, vibrant and fiercely felt poems are sure to evoke strong responses in readers. Refusing oblique irony, quotidian props, cant or any pretensions to urban hipness, Pascale Petit takes considerable risks.
With fierce courage, she not only survives the brutal facts of her past, but transmutes them, through vivid imagination, into art.
Editorial Reviews
Review
‘A blazing new arrival’
– Boyd Tonkin , The Independent, Books of the Year
– Boyd Tonkin , The Independent, Books of the Year
‘Although rooted in real experiences, this is poetry that is deeply, wonderfully imaginative.’ —
Poetry Book Society, Next Generation Readers’ Guide‘No other British poet I am aware of can match the powerful mythic imagination of Pascale Petit’
–Les Murray,
‘This is a wonderful and red-raw collection that captures pain, love and loss.’
—
About the Author
Pascale Petit was born in Paris, grew up in France and Wales and lives in London. She has published six collections of poetry. Her latest book Fauverie is shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. Five poems from it won the 2013 Manchester Poetry Prize. Her fifth collection What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo was shortlisted for both the TS Eliot Prize and Wales Book of the Year.
