#mama amazonica

[derangedrhythms]

Pascale Petit, Mama Amazonica; from 'Bestiarum'

[documentary-surrealist]

Pascale Petit, Mama Amazonica; from 'Jaguar Girl' via: tumblr.com/derangedrhythms

[pwpoetry]

Q&A with Pascale Petit

M: There is a family narrative that runs through the collection, as well as the underlying theme of environmental catastrophe and extinction. Can you speak to how these two concerns parallel or amplify each other? P: I write intuitively, guided by images, the song of the line, its dynamic, and by my excitement towards the subject. The draft has to feel true. When I write well, I am playing with all these elements, it’s a serious play, but I am in a childlike tranced state. The themes that emerge in the book appear almost as a by-product – they don’t lead it.

Tiger Girl reveals the cruelty of human beings in their treatment of non-human life, and each other. If I look back on my books, I suspect that most of them are asking this question: are humans essentially good or bad? Perhaps that’s why I’m driven to examine the way that people in power treat the powerless. I’ve tended to do this by holding a magnifying glass to my dysfunctional family, in particular on my parents and difficult childhood. In Tiger Girl I focus on the benevolence of my Indian grandmother, who took me in as a baby, then later, from the age of seven until fourteen. She didn’t have to do that, so in Tiger Girl she is a force for good, and the book is in a way a series of grandmother love poems. She is this saviour, who herself was saved. Her origins are a mystery, but I’ve been told that in Rajasthan where she was born, she was taken in by her father’s white family, while her real mother was the maid. I wanted to explore her heritage, her country, but most of all – I wanted to see a wild tiger as she had done as an infant, when one walked into her tent. So, I went to India to experience the wildlife, and fell in love with it; the national parks are brimming with animals and birds!

Going into the tiger forests in open jeeps is addictive! I’d wake at four, and be at the forest gate by five, waiting for it to open. Then the rush to find tracks, to catch a tigress patrolling her realm, the theatre of alarm calls that we’d be in the centre of, a sensurround of barks started by langurs at their treetop lookouts, and taken up by the deer. The tiger hidden, but there! But I soon realised what an immense struggle it is to keep the tigers alive, as well as all the other fauna – elephants, sloth bears, mongooses, owls and Indian rollers. Poaching is a constant threat. The parallel with my family story – how my grandmother was saved by her father, how I was saved by her from more years in an orphanage, and from the “poaching” of my parents on my body and soul, is a testimony to kindness and love. It’s kindness, love and empathy for wild animals that can save them from cruelty and abuse. We only have to empathise with them to know they suffer, and to stop the suffering. The situation in India is complicated, as in many wild parts of the world, by poverty. I’ve heard and read accounts by poachers who became forest guards, who went on to protect the tigers they once poached. Their guard-work is informed by their poaching experience; they know when and where incursions into the forest will occur. But what struck me was the indifference one guard divulged in his former life as a poacher. My account of his poaching methods is recorded in my long poem ‘In the Forest’. He needed the money for food. His need killed his empathy, his victim was just a means to make money, not a companion suffering being. The animal/human predicament echoes the dynamic between a person with power (such as a parent or president) and the powerless. M: That makes a good deal of sense given how I read the book, one image layering over the next in an intuitive, almost subconscious way. What was your revision process like, and how did you determine the arc of the book? P: I started writing Tiger Girl just after the Brexit referendum. My anxieties about citizenship and possible expulsion – I eventually applied and got British citizenship – reminded me of my grandmother’s situation, and how she’d had to conceal the fact that she was Indian. I hadn’t been aware of it when I lived with her as a child. All I could really remember were certain mysteries, her tiger stories, her speaking Hindi in her sleep. I started researching where tigers were in India, and read every tiger book I could find. I planned my first trip to Ranthambore National Park in Rajasthan, followed by Kanha and Bandhavgarh National Parks in Madhya Pradesh, the tiger heartland. I went over twice, and would have gone more, but Covid-19 happened. I had no idea there’d be so many animals and birds – imagine discovering your heaven then realising it is under threat of vanishing. This is the situation we find ourselves in on this planet: the wild is a place of awe and wonder, but it’s vanishing even as we discover new species. So, what set out to be a personal quest for identity and heritage, became a story about the forests and their fauna. Of course, now, because of Covid-19, there are new threats to wildlife, not least because it’s a zoonotic virus that it is thought originated in bats, passed through a mammal such as the much-poached and probably soon-extinct pangolin, to humans. My personal experience of cruelty at the hands of parents gave me empathy with the animals that are tortured and killed. Are they the childhood of the planet? I’m terrified that we will end up as the only large mammals on Earth, our companions gone, their homes destroyed. It’s unbearable to imagine a world without forests or animals, so, throughout Tiger Girl, there are flashes of hope, clearings with sunlit birds or rare deer. There is also fire threaded through, simmering in the first poem ‘Her Gypsy Clothes’, becoming a roar in the final poem ‘Walking Fire’. None of this was planned, but as I was finishing the manuscript one year ago, our world seemed to be on fire, from California to the Amazon, to New South Wales.

My revision process varied wildly, some poems wrote themselves whole, especially ‘In the Forest’ and ‘Green Bee-eater’. Others needed many recasts. With ‘The Anthropocene’, I had the moving image of the planet as a bride wearing a peacock dress as soon as I saw the news items of the Chinese bride in hers. The image wouldn’t let me be, so those lines hovered on my desktop. But the song of the poem came later, after I’d read The Night Life of Trees from Tara Books, featuring art of the tribal forest artists, the Gond from Madhya Pradesh. I kept looking at the trees they’d printed, and reading the captions from their beliefs. One tree is called ‘The Peacock’, and the caption said “when the peacock dances in the forest, everything watches, and the trees change their form to turn into flaming feathers”. And that gave me my song. The stepped form on the page felt right and might suggest a bride’s train or poised waves. There was a particularly violent hurricane season last year as I was drafting it, so that became the theme, of climate change.

M: As someone who writes about animals--and who is enamored with them--I share your pain and terror at the thought of a future without them. How do you see the poems in Tiger Girl speaking to the poems in Mama Amazonica?

P: Tiger Girl features my grandmother and her tiger childhood, and Mama Amazonica is a portrait of my mentally ill mother as the Amazon rainforest. These two women hardly spoke to each other in the last years of their lives; they are in many ways opposites.  

Both books juxtapose a family in crisis with the natural world in crisis, and link abuse of women and children with abuse of animals and forests. But I don’t set out to do this, it’s what the poems reveal. If I take the central poem of Tiger Girl, which is for me ‘In the Forest’, and compare it to the central poem of Mama Amazonica, which for me is ‘My Amazonian Birth’, Mama Amazonica is more hopeful of a human’s rebirth in the pristine rainforest, even if that rainforest is sick and broken. What happened between the writing of the two books was Trump’s increasingly anti-eco politics and the rise to power of Bolsonaro in Brazil, followed by the election of Boris Johnson in the UK and a general global rise of fascism and contempt for the natural world. Yet, the personal story in Tiger Girl, of my Indian grandmother saving me from my abusive parents, is hopeful. And there are splashes of hope throughout the book. There has to be hope. The human psychodrama is hopeful, because what my grandmother did, taking me in for two years as a baby, then for seven years as a child, passed her strong spirit on to me and supported me all my life. Yet, even there, there is betrayal, the story of her returning me to my mother, twice, while Mama Amazonica is both my abused and mentally ill mother, and the abused mother-forest. The human drama mirrors the drama that’s unfolding on our planet – a struggle for the oppressed wild to survive. In India, that struggle is an old one, where the plenitude of charismatic megafauna is in conflict with the dense human population and poverty. The only relatively safe forests are in national parks, yet even there, there is poaching. As for my writing journey – the ‘tiger girl’ of my Indian grandmother is a character I’ve rarely written about before, though it is she who opens my very first collection Heart of a Deer, published in 1998, with the poem ‘Mirador’, that also tells the story of her death on fireworks night. In Tiger Girl I wanted to explore her spirit, how nourishing the older woman figure was, who appeared “like a goddess to me”.

M: Are there any particular texts or works of art with which you feel the book is in conversation? 

P: Tiger Girl is mainly in conversation with two artists. As I began writing the book, I discovered installations by the Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, and felt very excited by them. I was first attracted to his work because of his installation Inopportune: Stage Two, of nine life-size replicas of tigers leaping through the air, shot and transfixed mid-leap by bamboo arrows. I almost felt at this stage that his work would dominate the book. I wanted to write my equivalents of his firework events. In the end, only two poems remained in my final cut: Ethereal Flowers, which I turned into ‘Her Flowers’, and Sky Ladder, which became my ‘Sky Ladder’. That he worked with gunpowder and fireworks and a ladder made of fireworks that explodes into the sky, felt a direct link to my grandmother’s death on Guy Fawkes night. I watched his film Sky Ladder, and my poem came out of the way he dedicated the event to his 100-year-old granny. The second main artist Tiger Girl is in conversation with is the late Pardhan Gond painter Jangarh Singh Shyam, founder of Gond art, whose tribe know the Central Indian forest secrets. Like him, I’m obsessed with deer and their antlers and how antlers mirror a forest. He died tragically early, but I wanted to honour him, so I wrote a poem for him, ‘Barasingha’, about the endangered twelve-tined swamp deer and how his life was changed after coming face to face with one. My cover art The friendship of the tiger and the boar is by him and I love how my publisher Bloodaxe has wrapped the Gond tree around the back cover.   As well as these two artists, a poem early in the book, ‘Surprised!’ is a response to Henri Rousseau’s painting, Surprised! (Tiger in a Tropical Storm) – I love his work! Other poems, such as ‘The Umbrella Stand’, were influenced by Jim Corbett’s tiger hunting books. William Blake hovers in the background of ‘In the Forest’ and ‘Wild Dogs’. ‘For a Coming Extinction’ is a response to the same titled poem by W. S. Merwin. In the poem ‘Her Staircase’, I managed to write about my grandmother’s fatal staircase through a re-imagining of the installation Staircase III, by the Korean artist Do Ho Suh, which I’d spent hours sitting beneath while tutoring poetry courses at Tate Modern. Two poems are even dedicated to my first love John Keats and his forested worlds.

[libromundoes]

Los poemas de Roger Robinson sobre Trinidad y Londres ganan el premio Ondaatje | Libros

La visión de Roger Robinson de Trinidad como un "paraíso portátil" de "arena blanca, colinas verdes y pescado fresco", ganó el premio de £ 10,000 del poeta británico-trinitense de la Royal Society of Literature, que a una obra que mejor evoca "el espíritu de un lugar".

La colección de Robinson, A Portable Paradise, que ya ganó el Premio TS Eliot, va desde el incendio de la Torre Grenfell hasta la generación Windrush y el legado de la esclavitud. En su poema titulado, escribe cómo "si hablo del paraíso, / entonces hablo de mi abuela / que me dijo que siempre lo llevara encima, escondido, para que / nadie más solo conoceme ".

En términos particularmente oportunos para hoy, el poeta, músico y activista político insiste en que "si su estrés es constante y diario, vaya a una habitación vacía, ya sea un hotel, una posada o un vertedero: encuentre una lámpara / y vacíe su paraíso en un escritorio: / sus arenas blancas, colinas verdes y pescado fresco. "

La colección de Robinson ha superado títulos como la novela preseleccionada de Elif Shafak, 10 minutos 38 segundos en este extraño mundo, y la exploración de Robert Macfarlane del mundo bajo nuestros pies, Underland.

El juez y poeta Pascale Petit, quien es el único otro escritor que ha ganado Ondaatje para una colección de poesía, titulada A Portable Paradise, es un "libro de curación" y "un libro profundamente conmovedor [que] logra equilibrar la ira y el amor, la ira y la artesanía ".

Petit, quien organizó reuniones con los jueces Evie Wyld y Peter Frankopan en Zoom, agregó: "Cada poema sorprende con sus imágenes, intensidad emocional y poder lírico, ya sea Grenfell , Windrush o el difícil nacimiento de un hijo, que también es un homenaje a una enfermera jamaicana ", dijo Petit, refiriéndose al poema de Robinson Grace, que lleva el nombre de la enfermera que acunó a su hijo. en cuidados intensivos neonatales.

Robinson, quien fue elegido por Decibel como uno de los 50 escritores que influyeron en el canon negro de la escritura británica, dijo que la victoria fue "formidable en muchos niveles".

"Obtener un reconocimiento más amplio de los problemas políticos planteados en A Portable Paradise es una de las cosas más importantes para mí, junto con más personas que leen sobre las luchas de las comunidades negras en Gran Bretaña, que con suerte , crea una empatía resonante más profunda ", agregó.

Robinson es solo el segundo libro de poesía en 16 años en ganar el Ondaatje, que puede ir a una obra de ficción, no ficción o poesía. La propia Mama Amazonica de Petit fue la primera, en 2018. Frankopan llamó a A Portable Paradise “un trabajo fabuloso e ingenioso que emerge en su condena de la injusticia pero brilla en su ternura y sutileza y se regocija en celebrar las cosas que nos hace únicos ", mientras Wyld dijo que" los pequeños detalles, la complejidad y el horror de lo que escribe y la claridad con la que logra salir del otro lado son bastante sorprendente ".

El anuncio del ganador el lunes por la noche estuvo marcado por un video de animación especialmente encargado por Liang-Hsin Huang, un recién graduado del Royal College of Art, en lugar de la cena habitual en lazos negros, debido a la pandemia de coronavirus.

The post Los poemas de Roger Robinson sobre Trinidad y Londres ganan el premio Ondaatje | Libros appeared first on Libro Mundo.

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[alanbenin-blog]

🌺 🍃💓 #altafloresta #ensaiogestante #gestante #gravida #mamae #love #fallowme #canont5 #canonphotos #canon #me #like #ensaiofotografico #ensaio #ensaioexterno #matogrosso #canon50mm (em Floresta Amazonica Hotel)

[derangedrhythms]

Pascale Petit, Mama Amazonica; from 'Jaguar Girl'

[derangedrhythms]

Pascale Petit, Mama Amazonica; from 'Ah Puch'

[derangedrhythms]

your necklace / of owl's eggs, your bracelet of moths.

Pascale Petit, Mama Amazonica; from 'My Mother's Wedding Dress'

[derangedrhythms]

Pascale Petit, Mama Amazonica; from 'Limed Blossoms'

[derangedrhythms]

Pascale Petit, Mama Amazonica; Chaplet

[derangedrhythms]

Pascale Petit, Mama Amazonica; from 'My Mother's Wedding Dress'

[derangedrhythms]

Pascale Petit, Mama Amazonica; Taxidermy

[the-haiku-bot]

ALTPascale Petit,

Mama Amazonica;

from ‘Bestiarum’

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

Pascale Petit, Mama Amazonica; from 'Bestiarum'