In 2018 Petit was elected as a Royal Society of Literature Fellow. She is widely translated and travelled, particularly in the Amazon rainforest and Indian tiger forests. The poet Daljit Nagra has said of her work: ‘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.’

There is something of the cumulative effect of layering paint over a stark white canvas – in Petit’s case the starkness is the rawness of trauma – of mixing ‘the blue sting [and] the red ache’. In 'The Strait-Jackets’, the poet curates forty hummingbirds around her incapacitated father, so that he ‘can see their changing colours’ – the room brightens and his breathing improves for the fleeting few moments the birds are allowed to roam free. Her poems often locate feeling in a clearly articulated natural agent or conceit – ‘Self-Portrait with Fire Ants’ sees a father’s lack manifested in ‘a mask of fire ants’ which smother the abandoned speaker; only the father as ‘giant anteater’ can clear them, but that brings with it new, more sinister problems. And in ‘Emmanuel’, the largest bell in the Notre-Dame cathedral comes to accommodate a father’s ‘badness’ in its great mass; the palpability of its unflinching ‘F sharp’ and the aftermath of its ‘hum’ is a sound more absolute than anything ‘he said / and didn’t say’. Petit reveals in her introduction to this recording that she has in fact been up to the Emmanuel bell and touched it – and this tactility, its ‘bronze weight’, she sculpts so well out of the language. The poem ends in proclamation, but the poet remains measured in her reading voice – a voice that never overblows the confessional element of its subject matter; though impassioned, it is one of syllabic pace and care. Hers is a voice we can learn much from – confident with the advice she gives us on reading her poems, but always compassionate and inquisitive in tone, to ask, as she does in ‘Fauverie IV (Black Jaguar)’ – ‘what vet could take / a scalpel to this / dreaming universe?’

Pascale’s rich and measured readings of poems from “Mama Amazonica” draws out the strength, vulnerability and inspiration provided by the Amazonian rainforest in the context of a daughter’s experience of her mother’s mental health crises.  In the title poem, we find the mother on a mental health ward undergoing a ‘…deep sleep cure...’ in the company of numerous creatures from the rainforest, ‘...a sloth clings to a cecropia tree, / a jaguar sniffs the bank.’ ‘...a caiman basking beside her.’ In Mama Amazonica, Pascale has opened up a deeper connection to place and identity which she shares with the listener and reader without reserve.

Pascale Petit's favourite poetry sayings:

"the smoulder // of black rosettes / a zoo of sub-atoms / I try to tame - " - 'Sleeping Black Jaguar', Pascale Petit

“It’s wonderful, there’s nothing else like it, you write in a trance. And the trance is completely addictive.” - Les Murray

“I like to write with raw colour, working on the truth and tune of my lines, until they feel like a chant with some primitive quality, something of childhood.” - Pascale Petit

"This is hunting and the poem is a new species of creature, a new specimen of the life outside your own." - Ted Hughes

"Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you to write. This above all, ask yourself in the stillest hour of night: Must I write?"- Rainer Maria Rilke