What Pascale Petit gave me

Buy this book, read these poems. I would say 'no words can describe' but i managed to churn out a few.

Frida Kahlo is a national symbol of hope and passion in her home country of Mexico, celebrated for her creativity and conveyance of emotional turmoil.  Her life is comprehensively documented across the canvases she brushed with her artistic prowess. However, art, just like poetry, is majorly interpretational – the thoughts and feelings can vary from audience to reader. There will always be a degree on uncertainty tainting which ever critic, that art student, the opinionated conversationalist. You were not there. Not with Pascale Petit. She is there. Bold, unflinching and unbelievable daring, her poems dismembers and intrudes so fantastically into Kahlo’s legacy. ‘‘The Bus’’ is a quietly passionate poem exploring the event which ripped this young artists world and body apart, a pivotal day which will forever last as ‘the morning of my life’. Pascal presents the detached victim mourning for who she was in a disconnected and indifferent piece which captures it to a degree that you’re surprised Kahlo didn’t pen this herself. The unemotional statements ‘the bag explodes’, ‘sticks to my splattered skin’, are so poignant parts because they are not emotional. They skirt build up the picture of a woman struggling to come to terms with the accident – a classically unnerved and void victim.

The unbelievably perceptive nature runs into “Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (II)”, this time revealing an explicitly convincing thought process of the artist. The disconnected and broken poem of Pascal opens up an otherwise cosseted piece. She delves in so deep to unravel the biographical elements of Kahlo and captures her voice perfectly (not that I know Kahlo, but this is how credible Petit is). Through her impassioned speech ‘before a streetcar rammed me’, teamed with the broken poetry, Pascale gives a haunting recollection into the troubled life of Kahlo. However, there is no sense of self pity or misery, just a burning ferocity that she was renowned for. Even just technically, the imagery is stunning ‘and lick my brush until it hovers like a humming bird at a flower’, painting a scene so powerful I can smell the turpentine.  

                        Petit is audacious, almost sacrilegious in her work to an astonishing degree. She gives a voice in a beautifully compelling way to an artist silenced; only speaking through her paint. Not only are they fantastic dissections of pieces of art, they add a dimension otherwise unknown into an unreachable woman. Though I wouldn’t want the sheer brilliance of Petit as a poet to be overshadowed by Kahlo, it is impossible not to as in these poems which are stunning tributes to imaginative poetry and Frida Kahlo herself. As a poet it is easy to dictate the though process of ones own mind but to dedicate yourself as diligently and realistically as Petit is truly incomparable.  I have honestly never been so inspired or excited by a poet, rushing to inform my teachers and the rest of the art block about this pure gem that can only be described as exceptional.

http://www.pascalepetit.co.uk/