Everyone admired Pascale Petit’s courage in writing the poems in The Zoo Father. We needed to summon some courage of our own reading them. Once more, folk appreciated the support of the group in tackling ‘difficult’ poems: stirring themes of abuse, betrayal and loss were transformed here into work of shocking beauty and tenderness.
The poems enact rituals of transference and empowerment, using symbols drawn from the author’s travels in the Venezuelan Amazon. They sing with birds and violins, shimmer with octopuses and sunlight, rattle with stones and shrunken heads. The selection we read in the session took us through the ‘story’ of a dying father, a sick mother, a lost childhood and the reclaiming of personal power and the coming to terms with a legacy of half a hectare of French vineyard. The poems are compact and unornamented, inhabiting a non-linear, non-rational reality, not unlike a shamanic dreaming. Pascale Petit’s training as a sculptor also contributes to the sense of how these intensely physical poems were shaped.
It was tempting to ask questions about the autobiographical background but, as we usually do in the Poetry Room, we tried to keep returning to the body of the text, trusting what the poet wished to illuminate and make public, remembering the appreciation is always enhanced by focussing on the craft.
The two men present admitted some discomfiture at the father’s treatment of his daughter, offering a valuable perspective on this work, which makes no simplistic, generalised judgements but, again bravely, says what is hard to say and at the end of the evening left us all uplifted and deeply impressed. We parted with the cry of kingfishers calling us home – Tchi chee kwee kwee.
We’ll be exploring very different territory in next month’s Poetry Room when we’ll be looking at TS Eliot’s classic collection The Waste Land and Other Poems – Tuesday 28th April at 6.30 pm in Blackwell’s. ??????? ????????????? ????? ??????
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