Pascale Petit's Blog, page 12

Five poems recorded by PoetCasting

Alex Pryce has just published recordings of five of my poems on PoetCasting . Three are from What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo : 'What the Water Gave Me (VI)', 'The Little Deer' and 'Remembrance of an Open Wound'.  I'll be reading these and others from the book at my London launch this Thursday, 17th June, at The Horse Hospital, Bloomsbury, London, together with a slideshow of the paintings. I'll also give an illustrated reading at Lancaster Litfest on 23 June. As well as the...

Poem from What the Water Gave Me in today's Guardian

'The Bus' from What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo is the Saturday Poem in today's Guardian. This is the title of Frida Kahlo's painting The Bus, and I wrote this in her voice, about the moments before the accident when a trolley car slid into the wooden bus she was in and she was impaled by a handrail, leaving her disabled for the rest of her life. The poems in my collection are all spoken in her voice and explore how she valiantly countered this trauma through vivacity and...

Poetry from Art at Tate Modern - spring course photos

During my spring Poetry from Art course at Tate Modern, two photographers – Katie Snooks and Masayo Matsuda – took photos of us working in the Arshile Gorky exhibition. The paintings we worked with were 'Waterfall' and 'How My Mother's Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life'. The resulting poems are included in an online publication on the Tate Modern website. I'm now planning for the summer course which starts Monday 7 June in the Mona Hatoum installations in the Poetry & Dream wing: 'Home'...

What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo has arrived!

It's really strange to hold a collection that's taken 10 years to write, but here it is at last, with Frida Kahlo's surreal painting What the Water Gave Me on the cover, where she's surrounded by scenes from her life and her paintings, floating like islands in the bath. You can order it direct from my publisher Seren, buy it tomorrow if you come to my first reading from the book on Saturday May 1st at Chepstow, when I'll be reading with the great Les Murray for Poetry on the Border, or come...

Notes from the Haut Languedoc

I'm writing this from Lodeve in Herault, France, a place I've known since I was twelve, when my estranged mother bought a steep terraced vineyard on the road from here to the hamlet of Les Plans (The Maps). We used to camp there in the two mazets (shepherds' huts) in summer holiday, getting to know her. The vineyard was a Christmas present to my brother and myself, just a drawing on a card which had advent type windows with maps she'd drawn of a half-hectare of land with a stream, huts...

Reading with Les Murray on 1st May in Chepstow, South Wales

Les Murray will be reading in Chepstow, South Wales, for Poetry on the Border on 1st May and I am thrilled to be reading with him. He's both a great world-class poet and a lovely generous-hearted person whose poetry has magnificent sprawl and a high degree of trance. Among his many honours he has won the TS Eliot Prize and has been awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry on the recommendation of Ted Hughes. He's been very generous to me, encouraging my work since before the publication of...