Mama Amazonica is set in a psychiatric ward and in the Amazon rainforest, an asylum for animals on the brink of extinction. It reveals the story of Pascale Petit's mentally ill mother and the consequences of abuse. The mother transforms into a giant Victoria Amazonica waterlily, and a bestiary of untameable creatures - a jaguar girl, a wolverine, a hummingbird - as she marries her rapist and gives birth to his children. From heartbreaking trauma, there emerge luxuriant and tender portraits of a woman battling for survival, in poems that echo the plight of others under duress, and of our companion species. Petit does not flinch from the violence but offers hope by celebrating the beauty of the wild, whether in the mind or the natural world.
Mama Amazonica is Pascale Petit's seventh collection, and her first from Bloodaxe. Four of Pascale Petit's previous six collections have been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
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[Picture my mother as a baby, afloat / on a waterlily leaf / a nametag around her wrist - MAMA AMAZONICA]***
(Bloodaxe Books, 28 September 2017, 112 pages, ebook borrowed from @natpoetrylib via @OverDriveLibs)
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I'd never heard of the poet before I decided to read this collection because the title intrigued me and I loved the cover. I've clearly been missing out. This is one of the best poetry collections I've read in a long time. The poems are really about the mental illness of the poet's mother and the consequences of abuse. These, often dark themes are explored in a brilliant and unique way, something I've not come across before. The poems, which imagine her mother as a giant waterlily and the mental institution as a rainforest populated by beautiful freaks and monsters blew me away. The poems are still dark and disturbing but completely original. I feel humbled to have read this astonishing collection. I need to read the poet's other collections. If Mama Amazonica is anything to go by I'm in for a treat.
