Pascale Petit's Beast: reviews & interviews
‘A kaleidoscopic menagerie of creatures, both heavenly and demonic, await the reader in Pascale Petit’s astonishing collection Beast.’ – Georgie Henley, Poetry Wales
Pascale Petit's ninth poetry collection, Beast, was published by Bloodaxe in April 2025. It is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Summer 2025.
In this new collection, mythic and familial beasts roam wild landscapes. These spirits haunt forests in India and the Amazon as well as the Camargue and Languedoc in France, as well as Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. Some of these remote places are vestiges of earth’s pristine habitats, while other wildernesses are encaged in cellars of Paris, along with the world’s last species. Beast asks if survival is possible in an abusive family and on an abused home planet, in the face of climate catastrophe, childhood trauma and war. These poems face difficult challenges and insist that making art is an act of love and hope, and there are joyful lyrics celebrating the ineffable beauty of endangered species.
Her eighth collection Tiger Girl, published by Bloodaxe in 2020, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2020 and the English language poetry category of Wales Book of the Year 2021. Her seventh, Mama Amazonica, awarded Poetry Book Society Choice for Autumn 2017 and shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018, won the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2018 - the first time in the prize's 15-year history that a poetry title won the award. It also won the inaugural Laurel Prize, Poet Laureate Simon Armitage's new award for eco and environmental poetry. Pascale presented her Laurel Prize commission; 'Beast of Bodmin Moor' at Cornwall AONB on 22 September 2021. In 2018 she was appointed as Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2015, and was the chair of the judges for the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize. Her novel Hummingbird Father was published by Salt in 2024.
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Pascale has been touring the UK giving readings from Beast at festivals and other venues. For details of upcoming events, see: https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/events?articleid=737
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BBC RADIO 4 PUBLICITY FOR PASCALE PETIT
Poetry Please: Pascale Petit, BBC Radio 4, Tuesday 24 June 2025, 4pm
Pascale Petit was Roger McGough’s guest on Poetry Please on 24 June. She chose poems requested by listeners and talked about why she had chosen them. She also spoke about how she began writing poetry at school, and the importance of animals in her work.
Among Pascale’s choices were two poems by fellow Bloodaxe poets. Niall Campbell’s poem ‘I am so Happy. I am so Happy. I Loved my Life’, the opening poem from his third collection The Island in the Sound, was recorded especially for the programme by Niall. Moniza Alvi’s poem ‘How the World Split in Two’ from her 2008 Bloodaxe retrospective Split World: Poems 1990-2005 was read by Juliet Stevenson.
Pascale also read and introduced her own poem 'The Lammergeier Daughter', from her recently-published ninth collection Beast.
'Roger McGough talks to French British poet Pascale Petit as she chooses her favourites from the poems requested by listeners. Her choices include favourites from Keats and Gerard Manley Hopkins, an appreciation of 'invisible' nurses by Romalyn Ante, and pleas for peace and understanding from Warsan Shire and Moniza Alvi.'
Niall’s poem is introduced at 5:23 and Moniza’s at 22:16. Pascale speaks about poetry and animals and then reads her poem from 9:34.
The programme will be available on BBC Sounds until 4.30pm on 24 July 2025.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002dzgc
VIDEO INTERVIEW WITH PASCALE PETIT
Wasafiri, sub(VERSE)ive: In Conversation with Pascale Petit, 26 May 2025
A fifty-minute video interview with Pascale Petit about her ninth collection Beast features in Wasafiri Magazine’s sub(VERSE)ive series of conversations with contemporary poets who are releasing new collections in 2025, exploring their practices and creative processes. Hosted by Prerana Kumar, whose close reading of the book and insightful questions made this an especially interesting discussion. The interview ended with Pascale reading ‘The River’, the opening poem from Beast (from 49:02).
REVIEW COVERAGE
Mslexia Magazine, Summer 2025
Pascale Petit’s new collection Beast is well reviewed by Ellora Sutton in the Summer issue of Mslexia. The review is divided into sections: style, subject, signature and summing up.
‘These poems gallop with surrealism – each page is like stepping into a Frida Kahlo painting, or perhaps a work by Louise Bourgeois. […] Petit’s beasts dance through her language. […] For Petit, metaphors give form to the unspeakable. […] Although there may not be answers, there is powerful knowing here.’ – Ellora Sutton, Mslexia, on Beast
In print in the June-August 2025 issue. Available online by subscription: https://mslexia.co.uk/
WELSH REVIEW COVERAGE
Buzz Magazine, May 2025
Beast was given a brilliant review by Mab Jones in the May 2025 issue of Buzz Magazine Wales, illustrated with a colour cover photo. The online edition was published on 15 May.
‘In this, her ninth collection, Pascale Petit summons a vivid bestiary of creatures – tigers, wolves, horses, dragons – across mythic and endangered landscapes: the Camargue of Provence, the tiger forests of India, the wilder edges of Cornwall. These animals are more than metaphor – they snarl, shimmer, and sob, taking on life and becoming, as we progress, fragments of memory or mirrors, watchers or helpers who “shield”. […] Family and the feral entwine, and trauma is not evaded but embraced, examined, and often transformed into dreamlike – nightmarish – yet also lyric imagery, via language that is lush but never overgrown. Rather, Petit’s lines are muscular, sensuous, and charged with feeling. There are moments of delicacy, but most palpably there is the song of survival… […] A remarkable work.’ – Mab Jones, Buzz Magazine
https://www.buzzmag.co.uk/new-poetry-may-2025-emily-jungmin-yoon-pascale-petit/
Poetry Wales, Spring 2025
Pascale Petit’s ninth poetry collection Beast was given a wonderful review in the 60th anniversary issue of Poetry Wales.
‘A kaleidoscopic menagerie of creatures, both heavenly and demonic, await the reader in Pascale Petit’s astonishing collection Beast. [...] This is a collection of many skins, pelts, furs, wings, as Petit finds strange sanctuary in the quotidian violence of the skies and sea. Bodies are pierced, bruised, bloodied, yet it is Petit’s plaintive assertions of hope that truly knock the breath out of her reader, ‘I am a door no one can open’.' – Georgie Henley, Poetry Wales
In print only.
US REVIEW COVERAGE
Publishers Weekly, 7 May 2025
Pascale Petit’s ninth poetry collection Beast was well reviewed in Publishers Weekly of 7 May. US distribution via Consortium Book Sales from 24 June 2025.
'Petit, who is of French, Welsh, and Indian heritage, embraces the landscapes of each of her countries of origin in potent brooding poems that explore trauma and transformation. Following the dark paths her memories forge, Petit documents scenes that seethe with life and startling imagery, “the air quivering with scented paths into the perfumed forest.” [...] It’s a vivid and elegant collection.' – Publishers Weekly, on Beast
View three articles per month for free.
https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781780377377
PASCALE PETIT INTERVIEWED ON BBC RADIO 4's THE VERB
The Verb, BBC Radio 4, Sunday 3 November 2024, 5.10pm
Pascale Petit was a guest on BBC Radio 4’s The Verb on 3 November 2024. She was speaking about her debut novel My Hummingbird Father (Salt) and talked about how her recent poetry collections grew out of this novel, which took her 17 years to write. Pascale read her poem ‘Civet de Cerf’ from her forthcoming ninth collection Beast, followed by a passage from her novel.
For The Verb’s ‘neon line’ feature poet Deryn Rees-Jones chose a line from the late Fleur Adcock’s poem ‘Things’ from her Collected Poems. She discussed the line itself with Ian McMillan, and then read and talked about the whole poem. Ian read the poem again. Deryn said that she had chosen this poem out of so many of Fleur Adcock’s poems which ‘feel like contemporary classics’ because ‘Things’ is ‘very unpretentious, but it also takes you to quite a complex psychological space’. Deryn Rees-Jones paid tribute to Fleur Adcock on BBC Radio 4’s Last Word on 18 October 2024.
‘Poet Pascale Petit opens up her first novel which took 17 years to write, examining the differences and similarities between poetry and prose and Deryn Rees-Jones reads from her own work and takes on this week's neon line, "all the worse things come stalking in".’
Available on BBC Sounds. Pascale Petit features from 12:09 and read the poem from Beast at 18:28. Deryn Rees-Jones discusses Fleur Adcock’s poem ‘Things’ from 30:56.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0024lm2
ONLINE LAUNCH EVENT FOR BEAST
Bloodaxe online launch reading with Pascale Petit, Vidyan Ravinthiran and Dis Poetry by Benjamin Zephaniah - Tuesday 22 April 2025, 7pm BST
Pascale Petit and Vidyan Ravinthiran celebrated the publication of their latest collections by reading live and discussing their books as well as Benjamin Zephaniah’s posthumous retrospective Dis Poetry: Selected Poems & Lyrics with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. The event includes clips of Benjamin Zephaniah performing and talking taken from Pamela Robertson-Pearce’s film To Do Wid Me which readers will be able access in full using the QR code printed in the book.
[28 May 2025]
