First of all, a bit of background. I've loved Frida Kahlo's paintings since I was about 12 (I remember first reading her name in a Jacqueline Wilson book). I'm an art and literature student, and although in the next stage of my studies I hope to concentrate on literature, art is my second love, so I've been very interested to see how Pascale Petit blends the two together. Frida Kahlo in particular is fascinating: she lived through so much, not just her personal experience, but world events, and she was one of the few Surrealist artists who were women. She had a turbulent life. She remains a figure of mystery and semi-myth. As an equality-of-the-sexes-ist (okay, FEMINIST. There we go, I said the scary word) she fascinates me - she must have had so much strength to survive all that she did, but at the same time she was vulnerable and Diego Rivera trod on her a bit. She's an interesting character. Yes, as I said, semi-mythological.
Background to the story of me and this book: first saw it in Waterstones months ago, it's been popping up all over my Amazon recommendations, read up about it, bought a tutorial of Petit's from The Poetry School (Towards a Collection - very good, wish I had the time and money to take one of her courses), saw it in Waterstones again left to think about it, went back and they had run out of copies. So after all that I now have it.
When I first heard about the book, I was a bit sceptical; it seemed quite a strange thing to me for a poet to try and get under the skin of another REAL person, someone who had their own internal experience that they chose not to put into poetry, and Petit seems to do this more intimately and intensely than other poets (those I have read) who are inspired by paintings or other arts. But now, after reading some of her work, and after the Poetry School tutorial, I understand better what it was that Petit is doing with Frida Kahlo. One of the reviews on the back of the book describes it as 'ventriloquism', and I think that this is a helpful analogy. Petit is exploring the woman and the myth of Frida Kahlo, and how the two reinforce and contradict one another. Kahlo's paintings, her expression of her experience, are interpreted into words by another artist. If we imagine Kahlo and her experience as the word of 'god', Petit is writing the King James bible. It isn't Kahlo herself, but boy is it beautiful English, and it distills her myth into delicious words.
If any of that makes sense. Basically what I'm trying to say is that despite my early misgivings, Petit's relationship with the spirit of Kahlo isn't weird at all. I feel that Petit isn't trying to write or be or sell anything that isn't her, herself. It's just that shes doing it through the exploration of the myth of Kahlo, and what might have been behind the myth.
Anyway, onto the poetry.
Petit writes concisely. Her poems take a variety of forms on the page. She's clearly a poet who really crafts her poems - every word works for its place (my teachers are always spouting on about how this is what makes poetry poetry, but it's amazing the number of published poets who do dilute their message through wasteful words. Petit isn't one of these). Just look at 'a zoo of pinks' ('A Few Small Nips'), 'lightning jigs like skeletons' (She Plays Alone...) and the simple but perfect 'violet morning' of 'The Suicide of Dorothy Hale'.
Petit's vision absolutely sucks you in. Her training as a painter is obvious in her deft use of colour, texture, and the senses. Unike Annie Freud, she shows, rather than tells. Although Petit uses the first person a fair bit, I don't feel that it is monotonous as in Jo Shapcott's 'Of Mutability', as she uses it to express a variety of voices - not just Kahlo's, or her own, but even the characters of the paintings themselves (see 'The Wounded Deer', where it is the deer of the painting speaking to Frida the painter).
I compare Petit's style to that of Ruth Padel; they are two poets who can stick disparate words together to create the perfect image, and who write about beauty and emotion beautifully and emotionally. Petit has done something really clever in these poems - taken the uncomfortable disjointedness of Kahlo's paintings and made beautiful poetry from all that pain - still as haunting but more dreamlike than Kahlo's nightmare reality.
OK, lots of waffle in this review. But basically, three points:
- Beautiful, evocative imagery
- Unique and vibrant vision, an ambitious collection
- Read it, it's really good.
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