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The Huntress
 
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The Huntress (Paperback)

by Pascale Petit (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
RRP: £7.99
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Product details

  • Paperback: 64 pages
  • Publisher: Seren (20 May 2005)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1854113968
  • ISBN-13: 978-1854113962
  • Product Dimensions: 20.8 x 13.4 x 0.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 103,613 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year, December 2, 2005
No other British poet I am aware of can match the powerful mythic imagination of Pascale Petit. (Les Murray)

Poetry Review, Winter 2005/6
A brave and unsettling collection. These are psychological explorations of relationships and power struggles that take risks.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Confessional poetry at its best, 4 Mar 2009
In The Huntress, Petit returns to the familiar ground of parental abuse visited with such force in her much-acclaimed previous collection, The Zoo Father. This time the subject is a psychotic and domineering mother, and for me this book is easily as good. The poems are passionate, startling, loaded with exotic and often dark imagery tempered by occasional glimpses of a tender empathy which makes you realize, with relief, that the predator and not the prey is the true victim of this story.

This is confessional poetry at its best, in your face and unashamed - thankfully, Petit does not do understated irony.

Coupled with the potency of her image-weaving, Petit plays the perceptions with an artistry that animates her poems in a way few are capable of. For example, in `My Mother's Perfume' a child's trepidation at an upcoming visit from her mostly absent mother is described, the remembered perfume made frightening as it seems to precede the visit, a jade cloud in the child's mind, `until her scent got so strong I could taste the coins in the bottom of her handbag'. You taste the bitterness of those coins, the child's fear brought to life through the sharp juxtaposition of the scent's sickly sweetness.

At the heart of the book is a long poem, `At the Gate of Secrets', which is a translation, or version, of Ferenc Juhasz' `The Boy Changed into a Stag Cries Out at the Gate of Secrets'. This was taken from earlier versions written by Ted Hughes and Kenneth McRobbie, but in this case it seems not so much a version as a transmogrification. She takes the earlier versions and flies with them to another world. Cruel and compassionate, nostalgic and acid in equal measures, it is written with a soaring beauty that serves as a poignant synopsis for the full collection.

The latter section of the book has several poems that depart the main theme, but this does not mean they disappoint. Indeed, some of the best work is here, most notably `The Mirror Orchid'. This is another long(ish) work, long-lined and quite complex, and unusually for Petit, a love poem. It merits repeated careful readings to fully absorb but the reward is well worth the effort. Set in the Garrigue in southern France, `a megasaurian massif', peopled by a vivid spectrum of the region's insects and flora, the lovers are a wasp and the seductive `Ophrys miroir' (mirror orchid). This is no sentimental rhapsody but a delightfully unique take on sexual attraction and its consummation - `Again and again, the pollinia are stuck to my head as I tumble into their gold thunders. / And my lover clasps me, drawing close as a male wasp can draw to a flower.'

If you have not previously read Pascale Petit, The Huntress would make a fine introduction.
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