Tiger Girl

"Yes, in that there’s a campaigning element here, worn quite proudly on its sleeve. Pascale made ambitious exploratory journeys to India , and is writing about parts of the subtropical jungles. She’s taking on a whole new continent from her last book, in which she looked at the Amazon. She went to see why people were capturing owls and sewing up their eyes, she went to see what prices were being asked for poached animals. You might associate that kind of investigative journey with documentary reportage, yet what she makes from it is very incantatory poetry. Her model is more Keats than Orwell I think. She wants to give us the lavishness of creatures in poems like ‘The Flycatchers’ or ‘The Bee-eaters’ when the streamers of tropical bird tails become the poem across the page. You feel you’re in the jungle, but you’ll also meet very distressing things. This is also made to feel very close to home, not somewhere way across the globe. The book is partly shaped around her relationship with her half-Indian grandmother. All its most extravagant and remote-feeling imagery comes to rest in evocations of her grandmother’s Welsh home, the greenhouse, particular pieces of furniture. So distances are closed, space concertinas. The family dynamics of a grandmother bringing up a small child become a way of thinking about huge global networks. Yes. This grandmother is fierce throughout, and has “tigress eyes.” And, like a tigress, she is protective of the young girl she has rescued. You can tell just from that outline that there’s a fairytale quality to it. Petit is very delicate and careful about how she uses fable and fairytale to forms of life-writing and documentary. Yes, it includes two poems from every shortlisted collection. And then each judge gets to recommend 10 or 12 other poems that were personal favourites from throughout the judging process. So there’s a terrific mix. There are the greats – Don Paterson has a comical and metaphysical masterpiece of a poem here called ‘Death’ —jostling with lots of entries for the best first collection, so poets we may not have heard before. Mina Gorji writes these miniscule four- or five-line poems: exquisite miniatures that suggest worlds; we’ve included her tiny poem ‘The Wasp’, and I hope those few lines will encourage people to buy the whole collection, The Art of Escape . You get a real sense of range: meditative poems of quiet watchfulness sit alongside Danez Smith’s ‘my president’, recalibrating American politics into something more like a house party. From the convent to the dance floor, new poetry comes together here, and all behind this blazing pink cover. Part of our best books of 2020 series."