Description
Book SynopsisPascale 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. It is shortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Four of her earlier collections were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
Trade ReviewNo 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] *
Pascale Petit’s Mama Amazonica powerfully twists together fantasy and experience. Over a sustained sequence of poems, Petit transfigures her mother’s desperate and disturbed life through fabulous imagery of the rainforest and its flora and fauna, moving towards a kind of extreme, Ovidian release into metamorphosis. It won the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize this year, a first for a book of poetry. -- Marina Warner * The Tablet (Books of the Year 2018) *
Table of Contents11 Her Gypsy Clothes 13 The Umbrella Stand 15 In the Forest 22 Green Bee-eater 24 Surprised! 25 My Mugger Crib 27 Her Tigress Eyes 28 Tiger Gran 30 Indian Roller 32 Her Bulbul 33 When I was eight my father visited and we went fishing 34 Mongoose Brushes 35 Chital Girl 37 Pump 38 Her Globe 40 Her Mouth 41 Baghwa 44 Her Washing 45 Landscape with Vultures 47 Her Half Indian Back 48 Flash Forests 50 #ExtinctionRebellion 52 Trees of Song 54 Her Teeth 55 Treasure Cupboard 56 A Tailorbird Nest 57 The Anthropocene 58 Snow Leopardskin Jacket 59 Grandala 61 Jungle Owlet 63 Her Glasses 64 My Velvet 65 Clouded Girl 66 My Grecian Urn 68 Indian Paradise Flycatcher 70 Wild Dogs 71 The Tiger Game 72 Nilgai 73 Prize Photograph 74 Hatha Jodi 76 Spotted Deer 77 Pangolin 79 Swamp Deer 80 Barasingha 82 Brown Fish Owl 84 Tiger Myth 86 Noor 87 Common Map 88 Passport 90 The Superb Lyrebird 92 Her Bedroom 93 Night Garden 94 Forest Guard 96 Jungle Cat 97 Mahaman’s Face through Binoculars 98 For a Coming Extinction 100 Her Staircase 102 Kew Gardens 103 Her Flowers 104 Sky Ladder 107 Walking Fire 111 Acknowledgements
