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Description
Pascale Petit’s Tiger Girl marks a shift from the Amazonian rainforests of her previous work to explore her grandmother’s Indian heritage and the fauna and flora of subcontinental jungles. Tiger girl is the grandmother, with her tales of wild tigers, but she’s also the endangered predators Petit encountered in Central India. In exuberant and tender ecopoems, the saving grace of love in an otherwise bleak childhood is celebrated through spellbinding visions of nature, alongside haunting images of poaching and species extinction.
Tiger Girl is Pascale Petit’s eighth collection, and her second from Bloodaxe, following Mama Amazonica, winner of the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize 2018 – the first time a poetry book won this prize for a work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry best evoking the spirit of a place. Four of her earlier collections were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
'This poem has an elegant form and distinctive imagery which convey and celebrate a bird native to Central Asia in a contemporary ode that really doesn't put a foot wrong from start to finish. And the poem asks us to think about this bird in relation to time, as observations become part of a subtle comment on the fragility and resilience of the natural world against a backdrop of the impacts of climate change.' - Judge Will Kemp on 'Indian Paradise Flycatcher', winner of the 2020 Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize (a poem from Tiger Girl).
