Kathmandu:

I have a woman’s face but I’m a little stag.

— Pascale Petit

I don’t like flat countries. Mountains are spiritual,” said distinguished British poet and editor, Pascale Petit during her recent visit to the Annapurnas.  “They go up into the sky world. In fact, before airplanes, mountains were

the only objects that went into the sky.”

Her passion for the mountains goes back to her childhood in the Wales. Pascale had to live in the mountains on a remote farm with her clairvoyant grandma who people in the area thought to be ‘a witch’ and read the same books, about five available there, all the time. Her mother had a bipolar demonic depression and worked in Paris, and her father had deserted them. In truth, she was the result of the rape that her father had committed in a hotel where her mother had initially worked as a room cleaner.

One of Pascale’s poems refers to the father who in

the last years of his life tries to contact her. However, when she goes to meet him in a hospital in Paris where he lies dying from lung cancer, he refuses to speak to her. Like the hundreds of letters that he had refused to open from young Pascale and her brother from the farm for years.

In the poem, the narrator brings a parrot from Brazil to perch beside her father’s bed until he learns to mimic her father’s language, his little phrases, and hum of the oxygen machine. By the time, the parrot masters the

language, the narrator

imagines bringing him back to her house and thinks of stroking his red and green feathers to coax her father’s voice from his beak.

A poet’s urge to speak through a parrot is a perfect image for Pascale’s creative oeuvre. In order to express her suffering, unlike other confessional poets like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, Pascale uses objects and images from the other world.  On the one hand, there are images from South America — Amazon rituals, wildlife and legendary Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo and metaphors of Buddha, Himalayan shamans and Everest from Asia on the other.

It was so soothing to find a British poet conjuring Himalayas even without visiting the region. It was also so very exciting to see her come to the real Himalayas that she had only imagined all her life. No wonder she resolved to come back to Annapurnas one more time and while leaving took the names of the birds, herbs, trees and glaciers along with the skull of a dead Himalayan eagle that she found on the mule trail.

Though Pascale started her career as a sculptor, she found metaphor and imagery easier to get from words than from the raw

material. Since she came from the poor working class background, she had

to struggle hard to get

established in London’s literary scenario. 

“As a woman you feel you’re an outsider, as if you come from another planet.”

A decade ago, the scene was very conservative and a fear of not being accepted by the canon hung heavy on

her heart. She refers to old boys’ network and now

boys’ network in the UK’s literary establishment.

Though Wales is poorer than London, she feels more at ease in Wales since Myth, Nature and Spirit is important there.

“Like Nepal, Wales is more linked to the Bardic tradition. But today as evident in the British issue of Pratik that I have come to launch, the scene has changed. Woman writers have equal say in the contemporary literary world.”

On the mood of contemporary British poetry, Pascale feels it is nature that seems

to be central to most of British poetry today. It has gone interwoven with the activism related to ecological preservation. In addition to Hungarian poet Ferenc Juhasz, Pascale favourite

poets’ list  range from

Keats and Coleridge to Less Murry, Mania Alvi, Sharon Olds, CK Williams and Galway Kinnell.

“A poet has to try to make a difference,” discerns Pascale, “to record language at its most creative and at the same time keep in touch with what it is like to be human, to see things from a conflict zone.”

A poet has to be interested in the poetry about life about edge aspect, she suggests. Like in her Frida Kahlo poems, she is more interested in physical suffering than mental self-indulgence. Pascale is interested in the life force, not in the realististic supernatural.

That’s why she uses Frida’s magic realism to describe the wounded deer of her life.

“I wear my mother’s body/ like a regional dress,” writes Pascale in her poem The Birth. “Its collar gripping my neck. /For now, her legs are my arms, /her sex is my necklace.”

The writer can be reached at writer@yuyutsu.de