The Huntress

by Pascale Petit

In this emotional follow-up to The Zoo Father, a daughter is haunted by her mentally ill mother until a series of remarkable transformations help her to conquer painful childhood memories. Over the course of the collection, the feared mother becomes a rattlesnake, an Aztec goddess, a Tibetan singing bowl, a stalagmite, a praying mantis, and then a ghost orchid, yet in the central poem the daughter becomes a cosmic stag and escapes her mother-huntress.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published May 28, 2006

About the author

Pascale Petit is a French-born British poet of French, Welsh and Indian heritage. Her ninth collection of poetry, Beast, published in 2025, is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her debut novel is My Hummingbird Father, published by Salt in 2024. Her eighth collection of poetry, Tiger Girl, published by Bloodaxe in 2020, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection and for Wales Book of the Year. A poem from the book, 'Indian Paradise Flycatcher', won the Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize. Her seventh collection Mama Amazonica, published by Bloodaxe in 2017, won the inaugural Laurel Prize 2020, and the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize 2018. It was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018. Her sixth collection, Fauverie, was her fourth to be shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. A portfolio of poems from the book won the 2013 Manchester Poetry Prize. Petit trained at the Royal College of Art and spent the first part of her life as a visual artist before deciding to concentrate on poetry. Three of her books were Books of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement, the Independent and the Observer. In 2004 the Poetry Book Society selected Petit as one of the Next Generation Poets. She is widely travelled, including in India, Mexico and the Venezuelan and Peruvian Amazon.

Website: http://www.pascalepetit.co.uk
Blog: http://www.pascalepetit.blogspot.com

'I am in love with this book! Haunting, grotesque, lush and strangely tender. A stunning debut novel, afraid of nothing and deeply poetic.' – Warsan Shire

'My Hummingbird Father shatters and heals, distils redemption out of a history of pain and abuse, and is one of the most affecting books you will read this year.' – Nilanjana Roy

'Rarely has the personal and environmental lament found such imaginative fusion, such outlandish and shocking expression that is at once spectacularly vigorous, intimate and heartbroken.’ - Daljit Nagra (judge for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2018)

‘Beautifully sad, the imagery inexhaustible, the sorrow and torment both tempered and sharpened by the relish for language and the ingenuity of the imagination.’ – Simon Armitage on Mama Amazonica

‘Radiant, and viscerally evocative… this image confirms the value of Petit’s work… in Mama Amazonica to make poems that are as radical as they are necessary – because they enable us to see in new ways.’ – Alice Hiller, The Poetry Review

'Pascale Petit’s Fauverie is astonishing, one of those books that breaks new ground in how to approach writing about the unwritable.' – Ruth Padel, London Review Bookshop Books of the Year

'Pascale's poems are as fresh as paint, and make you look all over again at Frida and her brilliant and tragic life.' Jackie Kay Books of the Year, Observer

'a hard-hitting, palette-knife evocation of the effect that bus crash had on Kahlo's life and work, exploring the way trauma hurts an artist into creation' – Ruth Padel, The Guardian

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

I saw Pascale Petit speak at a nature conference last year and enjoyed her poetry reading very much. I don’t think this was the best collection of hers to pick up first, though. Almost every poem is about her difficult relationship with her mother, who is likened to a serpent, a praying mantis, or the huntress of the title. There are echoes of mythology and Aztec legend. I found the overall emotional and metaphorical palette to be so limited as to make the book feel repetitive. The orchid poems (especially “The Ghost Orchid”) are perhaps the most interesting.

Favorite lines:

I found her monstrous
and would have preferred
to bury her in the cathedral crypt.
But she was my mother,
as much a victim as a devourer. (from “Portrait of My Mother as Coatlicue”)

[Zoë · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The idea of lineage is also present in Petit’s The Huntress, which juxtaposes colonial violence and gender conflict. Some critics have made the mistake of thinking that Petit’s The Huntress is set amongst the flora and fauna of the Amazon, but, drawing on Aztec myths of blood sacrifice, The Huntress uses a Mexican setting—few realise that Mexico contains its own rainforest.

Reviewers can be forgiven for missing this point, since Petit’s earlier collection, The Zoo Father, was set in the Amazon. Like The Zoo Father, The Huntress represents confrontation with an abusive parent, but here it is the mother. The narrative of La Llorona is at the heart of the collection, as the daughter-narrator uses Aztec mythologies as a means to communicate and understand. The initial reception of Petit’s collection has been somewhat preoccupied by the intense anger directed at the mother. In ‘At the Gate of Secrets’, the narrator tells how she will only be reconciled with her mother in ‘the grave / where we will torment one another’. Yet in other poems, such as ‘The Rattlesnake Mother’, the daughter states, ‘I think now how hard it was for her / to be a rattlesnake’. Petit’s poetry is designed to subvert readers’ expectations about female relationships and there will never be a Hollywood ending with saccharine tears and reconciliation. Sometimes Petit’s subversiveness can seem inflammatory, such as in ‘Portrait of my Mother as Coatlicue’:

Like Cortes, I found her monstrous
and would have preferred
to bury her in the cathedral crypt.

Coatlicue is a monstrous mother-goddess who in Aztec mythology wore a Medusa-like skirt of snakes. The daughter views Coatlicue with anxiety reminiscent of male fears about the female body and sexual appetite. In mentioning Cortez, Petit makes the connection here between the female body and the Orientalist view of other cultures: the ‘exotic’ and ‘sinister’ Aztec temples become the foundations for Roman Catholic cathedrals, just as the female body is appropriated to create a patriarchal lineage. What is so unnerving about this poem is Petit’s positioning of her daughter-narrator as Cortes, the coloniser, and it is problematic to consider where this comparison leads. Yet the narrator relents, stating: ‘But she was my mother, / as much a victim as a devourer.’ As in The Zen of La Llorona, the narrator of The Huntress comes to recognise that her mother’s violence and cruelty are inherited from her own experiences of pain. One of the most powerful poems, ‘Lunettes,’ creates a chain of association that begins with her father’s ‘glasses in the moonlight’ working its way through image after imager, until Petit finds an explicit motif for men’s brutality and women’s pain: ‘a forked iron plate / into which the stock of a field-gun carriage is inserted’."

Link: http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley...

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Astonashing and lush. Pascale is one of my favourite poets! This is the third collection I've read. I read 'Mama Amazonica' first and then went on to read 'Fauverie' soon after and now 'The Huntress'.
An earthy yet dream-like forest of emotions centred on her complex and tragic relationship with her mother. Pascale uses lyrical prose and animal-like personalities to express the intensity of a little girl walking through the wilderness, the jungle of her mother's mental illness. In one poem her mother is a rattlesnake, in another she's a white stag and in another she's a wasp or a praying mantis.

These poems are mystical yet grounded in earthly trauma of surviving deep wounds.

[Alex Hubbard · Rating 1 out of 5]

It is better if I do not speak. If I speak, I am in big trouble