Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Pascale Petit’s poems are rather scary. A menagerie of cruel and violent creatures which come alive in ‘The Hummingbird’, ‘King Vulture Father’, ‘The Fish Daughter’, ‘The Wasps’ Nest’, ‘The Horse Mask’, ‘The Ant Glove’ etc, they reveal the fractured interior world of someone who has suffered sexual abuse as a child. A bitter and bright catalogue of her father’s death and dying:

I know just what I’ve to do:
shrink myself to a tiny candirú,
the most feared fish in the river,
swim up your stream of urine
into your urethra, Father,
and wedge my backward-pointing barbs
deep into your penis.

     These poems show too much, as if they had come out naked beneath an overcoat in the depths of winter, their exotic heritage barely camouflaging the rage in her heart.

     It is as if the intensity of feeling that provoked them was such that it left little room for language to grow into the subject and really take root. Thus one reads appalled by the events described in the sequence of the poems but somehow not involved. Perhaps because the subject is so disturbing, one naturally hesitates to come too close.

     However, there are several exceptions including ‘My Father’s Lungs’, ‘My Father’s Clothes’, ‘My Father’s Books’ and this from ‘Embrace of the Electric Eel’:

as those great eels clamped against the bellies
of his threshing horses, how their eyes

almost popped out and their manes stood on end.
Though the jolt alone did not kill them,

many were so stunned they drowned.
That’s how it is, Father, when you open your arms

and press your entire length against my trunk.

Here the horror, power and excitement of the remembered situation is brilliantly and imaginatively trapped within the image of the eel on the horse; a symbiotic closeness, which is terrifying in its sealed paradox of steadfastness and impropriety.

     The final section of the book is devoted to poems about her mother, and has a softer tone. ‘Reverse Vineyard’ is a very tender poem about the changing relationship between a mother and daughter.

     This is certainly not a book for the fainthearted, it should be read with a stiff drink to hand.