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The Wounded Deer: Fourteen Poems after Frida Kahlo by Pascale Petit
(Smith / Doorstop, £3) 24pp.
Available from www.poetrybusiness.co.uk 


There can be few matches of poet and subject better than that between former Poetry London editor Pascale Petit and Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. In her previous collections from Enitharmon and Seren, including her recent The Huntress, Petit’s mode of operation has tended towards a similar fantastical, magical-realist treatment of her own family and personal history to that found in Kahlo’s paintings and diaries. In this slim pamphlet, Petit traces the life through the imagery of the art, from ‘My Birth’ (“I swivel my emerging head/ so you can recognise me/ by my joined-up eyebrows”) to the ‘third miscarriage’ of ‘The Flying Bed’ and the continual identification with emblematic symbols, as found in the Mexican Catholic tradition of the votive painting showing the death of a subject while simultaneously praying for the soul of the departed. In ‘The Wounded Deer’ Kahlo adds her own features to a forest animal pierced with arrows, and “small and dainty as I am…escaped into this canvas,/ where I look back at you”, while in ‘The Blue House’ Petit ventriloquises her subject’s belief that “I paint my living natures/ split open. My brush is a scalpel”). The shared imagery is consciously exotic, bringing birds of paradise, jungle foliage, monkeys and ‘fruits of light’ together in a sequence that seems entirely true to Kahlo’s own vision of the heart as a palette that “keeps beating,/ turning blood to paint”, and art as a means of both blunt truth (“my back smells like a dead dog”) and final redemption (“I am painting myself…on pages sweet as coconut milk,/ fresh from paradise”).