Poetry Readers Challenge discussion

I am in awe of the poetry of Pascale Petit and own many of her collections. I very much enjoyed Beast, but despite the surreally beautiful imagery and the environmental lyricism of the poems, I was not overawed by it. I'm trying to work out why.

I think it's a sense of repetition. May of the poems in this collection reminded me of poems in other collections, specifically Mama Amazonica, but also, to a lesser degree, Tiger Girl. I also felt this collection was a tad repetitive in itself, as beast after beast emerged from the nightmare of abusive family life.

The poems I liked best were those at the end of the collection that focused on Cornwall and Bodmin Moor. It may be because these poems evoked landscapes that I know so very well, but I also felt the latter poems brought a sense of freshness to the collection, a change of imagery and tone that allowed the words to emerge from the rich and exotic imagery of the previous poems and to stand as bare and exposed as the moorland they evoke.

Excerpt from "The Moor Horses"

They are frost and flint hooved, the appaloosa stallion
splashed with sparks from bonfires in the great caverns.

His mare erupts from the mud
and glares at us, her eyes dusted with rock sleep.

Hasn't she just woken from stone dreams? Doesn't her pearl coat
with its bronze paint tell us she is sacred?

And isn't your blood free as a feral pony, coursing
through the uplands of your body? Your bones granite,

your marrow clear as the brooks that thread down to the valleys.