What the Water Gave Me: Poems After Frida Kahlo
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About this ebook
Pascale Petit
Pascale Petit was born in Paris, grew up in France and Wales and lives in Cornwall. She is of French/Welsh/Indian heritage. Her eighth collection, Tiger Girl (2020), won an RSL Literature Matters Award while in progress, and she won the 2020 Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize with a poem from the book, 'Indian Paradise Flycatcher'. Tiger Girl is on the shortlist for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her previous collection, Mama Amazonica (Bloodaxe Books, 2017), won the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2018, was a Poetry Book Society Choice, was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018 and longlisted for the inaugural Laurel Prize. She has published six previous poetry collections, four of which have been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, most recently, her sixth collection, Fauverie (Seren, 2014). A portfolio of poems from that book won the 2013 Manchester Poetry Prize. 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 books have been translated into Spanish, Chinese, Serbian and French. She is widely travelled in the Peruvian and Venezuelan Amazon, China, Kazakhstan, Nepal, Mexico and India. Her fifth collection, What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo, published by Seren in 2010 (UK) and Black Lawrence Press in 2011 (US), was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot Prize and Wales Book of the Year. Two of her previous books, The Zoo Father and The Huntress, were also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
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Reviews for What the Water Gave Me
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- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Startling imagery. You can tell that Petit has a knack for the visual arts as well as for language.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Poems after Frida KahloFrida Kahlo is well known as a surrealistic “folk artist,” and her Mexican heritage is evident in her works. She’s also known for her stormy marriage to fellow artist Diego Rivero. However, very little is known about her personal life beyond those details and a rather infamous unibrow. When I received the poetry collection What the Water Gave Me by Pascale Petit, I was fascinated by what the poet achieved: a biography of Kahlo through verse. The combination of historical details and poetry in this collection is unique, and when I was able to look up some of the Kahlo's work online, it was especially fascinating. Each poem is related to a piece of Kahlo’s art, some having the same title. The poet imagines what Kahlo was thinking as she painted, and put those imagined thoughts into verse. Petit didn’t simply guess, however, she did meticulous research and even spoke to some of Kahlo’s acquaintances. As an artist herself, she was able to note visual clues in the paintings that would illuminate Kahlo’s mental state and attitudes.An important element is the accident Kahlo was in as a teenager: her spinal column, pelvis, collarbone, and several ribs were broken. An iron handrail also crashed through her abdomen and uterus. From this accident, and from her prior illness with polio, a lifetime of pain was a certainty. Many times she was bedfast for months at a time, and her frequent miscarriages were devastating. Her pain translated into her art, few of which appear happy or jubilant. In Kettenman’s 1955 biography of Kahlo, she is quoted as saying “"I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best." More than half her paintings were self-portraits.One of Kahlo’s most well-known works is “The Suicide of Dorothy Hale”, which she was commissioned to paint by a friend of Hale's. Hale had jumped from a skyscraper, and Kahlo rendered the descent as if the clouds were slowing her fall, so her scene in death is almost like slumber. Petit went one step further in the poem, concluding it with Kahlo’s imagined thoughts:“And I’m desolate as you wereThat violet morningWhen the window spoke its glass vowelsThat drew you to the balcony.”Petit’s interpretation of her biographical knowledge combined with the artistic clues make a powerful statement. The title of the book refers to a piece Kahlo completed, and it represents a woman in a bathtub with elements of her life symbolically played out in the water. The verses combine Kahlo’s art with the reality of this image (Kahlo took frequent baths to soothe her back pain as Petit notes) to imagine the emotional and physical pain Kahlo felt being a spectator for much of her life.