Event
8th October
Evening, Big Day of Poetry at Cramphorn Theatre.

Bio

Pascale Petit’s latest collection is What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo (Seren, 2010), which was shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize, Wales Book of the Year, and was a book of the year in the Observer. She trained at the Royal College of Art and spent the first part of her life as a visual artist before deciding to concentrate on poetry. She has published five collections, two others of which, The Huntress and The Zoo Father, were also shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and were books of the year in the Times Literary Supplement and the Independent. In 2004 the Poetry Book Society selected her as one of the Next Generation Poets. Petit is widely travelled, including in Mexico, the Venezuelan Amazon, China and Nepal. She currently tutors for Tate Modern and is the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art.

www.pascalepetit.co.uk
Blog www.pascalepetit.blogspot.com

Poem


The Bus

I have not yet caught the bus, but we are all here
ready to play our parts: the housewife with her basket,
the barefoot mother nursing her child,
the boy gazing out the window just as later
he’ll stare through the smeared pane and catch
the tram’s advance, his eyes wide as globes.
The gringo holds his bag of gold dust.
I am next to him, sixteen, my body still
intact when the bag explodes and something
bright as the sun fills the air with humming motes
that stick to my splattered skin. Then the labourer
with his mallet will heave the silver post out of me.
His blue overalls are clean. He is not surprised to find me
alive. Here, in Coyoacán at the stop, where the six of us
wait on a bench side by side, just as we will sit
in the wooden bus, comrades in the morning of my life.

from: What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo  (Seren, 2010)