Beast

by Pascale Petit

Poetry Book Society Recommendation

Mythic and familial beasts roam the swamps and moors of Pascale Petit’s Beast, a collection that ranges from the Camargue of Provence, the limestone Causses and gorges of the Languedoc, Indian tiger forests, the Amazon rainforest, to her home by Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. 


Some of these remote places are vestiges of earth’s pristine habitats, while other wildernesses are encaged in cellars of Paris, along with the world’s last species. Their essence is evoked in lithe and luxurious lines sometimes compressed as a trapped animal. An estranged father reappears as a hunter, while Maman is an orb spider or a grand piano; both are predators. And there are earthly beasts – wild horses and bulls, lammergeiers, bee-eaters and catfish, remnants of a vanishing natural world. 


Beast asks if survival is possible in an abusive family and on an abused home planet, with trials such as climate change, childhood trauma and war. These poems face difficult challenges and insist that making art is an act of love and hope, and there are joyful lyrics celebrating the ineffable beauty of endangered species.

Genres: Poetry

107 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 24, 2025

About the author

Pascale Petit is a French-born British poet of French, Welsh and Indian heritage. Her debut novel is My Hummingbird Father, published by Salt in 2024. Her eighth collection of poetry, Tiger Girl, published by Bloodaxe in 2020, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection and for Wales Book of the Year. A poem from the book, 'Indian Paradise Flycatcher', won the Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize. Her seventh collection Mama Amazonica, published by Bloodaxe in 2017, won the inaugural Laurel Prize 2020, and the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize 2018. It was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018. Her sixth collection, Fauverie, was her fourth to be shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. A portfolio of poems from the book won the 2013 Manchester Poetry Prize. Petit trained at the Royal College of Art and spent the first part of her life as a visual artist before deciding to concentrate on poetry. Three of her books were Books of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement, the Independent and the Observer. In 2004 the Poetry Book Society selected Petit as one of the Next Generation Poets. She is widely travelled, including in India, Mexico and the Venezuelan and Peruvian Amazon.

Website: http://www.pascalepetit.co.uk
Blog: http://www.pascalepetit.blogspot.com

'I am in love with this book! Haunting, grotesque, lush and strangely tender. A stunning debut novel, afraid of nothing and deeply poetic.' – Warsan Shire

'My Hummingbird Father shatters and heals, distils redemption out of a history of pain and abuse, and is one of the most affecting books you will read this year.' – Nilanjana Roy

'Rarely has the personal and environmental lament found such imaginative fusion, such outlandish and shocking expression that is at once spectacularly vigorous, intimate and heartbroken.’ - Daljit Nagra (judge for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2018)

‘Beautifully sad, the imagery inexhaustible, the sorrow and torment both tempered and sharpened by the relish for language and the ingenuity of the imagination.’ – Simon Armitage on Mama Amazonica

‘Radiant, and viscerally evocative… this image confirms the value of Petit’s work… in Mama Amazonica to make poems that are as radical as they are necessary – because they enable us to see in new ways.’ – Alice Hiller, The Poetry Review

'Pascale Petit’s Fauverie is astonishing, one of those books that breaks new ground in how to approach writing about the unwritable.' – Ruth Padel, London Review Bookshop Books of the Year

'Pascale's poems are as fresh as paint, and make you look all over again at Frida and her brilliant and tragic life.' Jackie Kay Books of the Year, Observer

'a hard-hitting, palette-knife evocation of the effect that bus crash had on Kahlo's life and work, exploring the way trauma hurts an artist into creation' – Ruth Padel, The Guardian

Reviews

[Lavelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I asked if I could leave the earth
but no one answered."

[Sue Finch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eagerly awaited and an excellent read.

[Chris Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didn't love it.