Running through every coppice

The latest poetry collection by UK-based Pascale Petit is Tiger Girl.

Here is glowing ecopoetry communing with the creative force of the natural world, its human-wreaked wounds. Yet hers is not only a lament but also a salve that opens us up to Nature. Petit twines ecological themes with her family’s Indian heritage and harmful relationships. For instance, a few of the poems speak of the father who raped his daughter. Further, the poems unpack the name of the book by telling how a child was sheltered by her grandmother as protective as a tigress: “My grandmother who took me back / for seven years from age seven, who saved my life, / praise to the mothering of my tigress!”

The collection moves from and returns to family history, the UK and India. Apart from symbolising her grandmother who was protective and had “second sight”, the Tiger Girl is also the “endangered predators” Petit came across or heard about in her travels in India. “I saw another man who led me to a cave / which he called his vault / and there was a tigress inside / giving birth to striped gold. / ... / and he placed coins in my hand / said it was jungle currency / and I knew then I was holding / the eyes of cubs. / I said to the poacher I’m not from here / I do not judge / but the eyes mewled in my hands / so I ran through every coppice / and every clearing / and looked at the moon / whose eye was sewn shut.” What a hard thing Petit pulls off. Her poems empower us to open up to remorse, compassion, hope, and the Nature that is in us.