Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Treekeeper's Tale
    The Treekeeper's Tale
    The Treekeeper's Tale
    Ebook79 pages57 minutes

    The Treekeeper's Tale

    By Pascale Petit

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A poet known for her fierce confessional style focuses on her passion for the natural world in this startling collection of vignettes influenced by California's giant redwood trees. These lyrical, resonant, strange, and imaginative poems echo in the mind and leave an indelible impression of the mysterious atmosphere of the redwood forests. Additional poems, inspired by the colorful paintings of German expressionist Franz Marc, blend and contrast dramatic imagery of red and blue horses with the tragic fate of Europe during World War I. Woven throughout are sensitive translations of original Chinese works and odes to the beauty of the Himalayas, influenced by the author's travel experiences in China and Nepal.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSeren
    Release dateSep 1, 2008
    ISBN9781854116185
    The Treekeeper's Tale
    Author

    Pascale Petit

    Pascale Petit was born in Paris, grew up in France and Wales and lives in Cornwall. She is of French/Welsh/Indian heritage. Her eighth collection, Tiger Girl (2020), won an RSL Literature Matters Award while in progress, and she won the 2020 Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize with a poem from the book, 'Indian Paradise Flycatcher'. Tiger Girl is on the shortlist for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her previous collection, Mama Amazonica (Bloodaxe Books, 2017), won the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2018, was a Poetry Book Society Choice, was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018 and longlisted for the inaugural Laurel Prize. She has published six previous poetry collections, four of which have been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, most recently, her sixth collection, Fauverie (Seren, 2014). A portfolio of poems from that book won the 2013 Manchester Poetry Prize. In 2018 she was appointed as Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2015, and was the chair of the judges for the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize. Her books have been translated into Spanish, Chinese, Serbian and French. She is widely travelled in the Peruvian and Venezuelan Amazon, China, Kazakhstan, Nepal, Mexico and India. Her fifth collection, What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo, published by Seren in 2010 (UK) and Black Lawrence Press in 2011 (US), was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot Prize and Wales Book of the Year. Two of her previous books, The Zoo Father and The Huntress, were also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

    Read more from Pascale Petit

    Related to The Treekeeper's Tale

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Hello Darkness My Old Friend

      Jun 17, 2020

      Hello Darkness My Old Friend
      4 min read

    • Article

      Cicadas Still Sing

      Jun 3, 2021

      IN LATE JUNE, the thrum of annual cicadas, or chicharras, as we call them here in San Antonio, becomes the dominant sound of summer. The air percolates with percussion as males buckle their ribs to make mating calls. If a female likes a male’s drummi

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Sonnet To Spring

      Apr 22, 2020

      A Sonnet To Spring
      4 min read

    • Article

      Here’s Looking At Ewe, Kid

      Jun 22, 2022

      Here’s Looking At Ewe, Kid
      3 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Jan 1, 2021

      I learned the world through the bottoms of my feet, barein the creeks of summer, stepping on pebbles, the squidgeof moss between my toes. On hot asphalt, the hop and skipover cracks, feet already toughened by bramble, dirt, the pricklyground of pine

      4 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Jul 1, 2022

      -ina: This suffix is used as an independent name,but doesn’t your little one deserve more?—a baby name origins website as in, I spent my playground days gasping endless into a machineas in, my elders blessed me with a second name, to ward off spirits

      5 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Sep 1, 2019

      Here in my hand a cone from the beautiful eastern white pine sitsan offering from the tree planted thirty years ago after earth softened upcome spring enough to dig a hole roughly twice the size of the burlapball around the root of it. The cone measu

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Songs Of Streams

      Mar 5, 2022

      The narrow creek is twisty and so tight that sometimes my kayak bounces off the banks like a pinball. Walls of grass above my head block any sense of the greater surroundings. I come to a fork in this watery maze and don’t know which way to turn. But

      3 min read

    • Article

      Lay Of The Land

      Aug 27, 2021

      TARA K. SHEPERSKY YOU WOULDN’T know how to get down here without someone to point out the path. You wouldn’t know there was a public beach at all. From the road, signs are few. An eclectic scatter of homes, distorted wave-speak rumbling from thick ra

      17 min read

    • Article

      The Ducks Of Home

      Sep 19, 2022

      The Ducks Of Home
      7 min read

    • Article

      Sacred Play

      Feb 27, 2024

      NATURE HAS ALWAYS soaked me in waterfalls of wonder. In a redwood forest, when I crawled into the hollow of an ancient tree and listened to its centuries of stories. By a lake, as I watched thousands of flamingos suddenly take flight. In the ocean, w

      3 min read

    • Article

      Song Of The Woods

      May 23, 2022

      Song Of The Woods
      7 min read

    • Article

      Six Bestiary Poems

      Nov 1, 2020

      The world, is it finite? Pliny the Elderon what he saw and heard, 37 “books” toround that up, early C.E. as heproceeded to be infinite. His Naturalis. His Historia.First bestiary ever in Book 8. Land lifeand sea life and through-the-air and undergrou

      4 min read

    • Article

      Death’s Footsteps

      Nov 29, 2017

      Death’s Footsteps
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Pandemic Can’t Lock Down Nature

      Apr 9, 2020

      Needing to clear my head, I went down to the Penobscot River. There they were, swimming with the mergansers, following an early pulse of river herring to the mouth of Kenduskeag stream: two harbor seals, raising sleek round heads for a few long breat

      4 min read

    • Article

      Meandering Paths Of Green

      May 12, 2021

      Meandering Paths Of Green
      5 min read

    • Article

      Lay Of The Land

      May 3, 2020

      TODAY I’m the self-appointed inspector of the alley behind our house. A mop rests end-up on my neighbor’s chainlink fence, its teardrop loops of purple string drying in the heat. Wisteria, I think, because it’s spring, and I have flowers on the brain

      17 min read

    • Article

      A Quiet Place

      Nov 20, 2023

      A Quiet Place
      5 min read

    • Article

      In The Teeth Of The Storm

      Mar 4, 2020

      In The Teeth Of The Storm
      5 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Sep 1, 2022

      I whooshedthrough the party. I grewa set of invisible hands. I was flower girlto the Commonwealth where lovers danced a dancecalled the snowdrift. Sugar mapleshelicoptered samarasin my glass. The dogs slackenedin their webs of shade. A democracyof cl

      2 min read

    • Article

      Poetry

      Apr 6, 2021

      Poetry
      2 min read

    • Article

      Evaporative Losses

      Sep 15, 2020

      Breath travels. Our mouths are broken-open places—a house where only wind lives, searching the cupboards and closets. I replace your missing mouths with those of jars, mines, graves. What is gathered and dissipated by mouth? Once alternately filled a

      4 min read

    • Article

      from BLACK PASTORAL

      Nov 1, 2023

      somewheres, some lifetimes ago I have run so far, so long.There is nowhere I haven’t beenBut here, in this field, a bodyLength from the ragged brinkThat gives way to forest.I collapsed here, the thin, hard slipOf me whittled at both ends.I want badly

      4 min read

    • Article

      Hush… It’s Spring!

      Feb 22, 2024

      Hush… It’s Spring!
      2 min read

    • Article

      When Winter Came Back

      Feb 24, 2021

      When Winter Came Back
      3 min read

    • Article

      Notes From An Author Ecuador

      Sep 1, 2022

      Notes From An Author Ecuador
      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Treekeeper's Tale

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Treekeeper's Tale - Pascale Petit

      Acknowledgements

      The Treekeeper’s Tale

      The Treekeeper’s Tale

      I have set up house in the hollow trunk of a giant redwood.

      My bed is a mat of pine needles. Cones drop their spirals

      on my face as I sleep. I have the usual flying dreams.

      But all I know when I wake is that this bark is my vessel

      as I hurtle through space. Once, I was rocked in a cradle

      carved from a coast redwood, its lullabies were my coracle.

      I searched for that singing grove and became its guardian.

      There are days when the wind plays each tree

      like a new instrument in the forest-orchestra.

      On wild nights mine is a flute. After years of solitude

      I have started to hear its song. I lie staring at the stars

      until the growth rings enclose me in hoops -

      choirs of concentric colours, as if my tree is remembering

      the music of the spheres. And I almost remember speaking

      my first word, how it flew out of my mouth like a dove.

      I have forgotten how another of my kind sounds.

      Chandelier-Tree

      I find myself staring at the spaces between

      fronds, where pure blue plumes appear,

      the air painting itself on my eye.

      And I see how the trunk doesn’t end

      where a person can climb, but continues

      to the redwood’s true crown, sky-feathers

      piercing the stratosphere, blue forest

      on blue, some white with lace frills

      of finest cirrus, before the wide canopy

      of night, its invisible leaves

      suddenly alert with stars — how they are

      glimpses of the tree of light.

      Exiled Elm

      My comet-roots trail earth through the dark,

      my trunk swarms with homeless insects

      and from my starry crown seeds

      scatter, searching for new worlds.

      Creation of the Birds

      after the painting by Remedios Varo

      I paint birds from starlight.

      The harder my art, the stronger their wings -

      solar or lunar feathered, iris-barbed.

      The ultrasonic syrinx,

      drawn from my violin-brush,

      starts to hum when I’m lonely.

      I release them while still wet, their songs

      liquid and light, not meant for base ears.

      Even the nests they weave in our old forests

      are harmonies — temporary mouths for our trees.

      Restless, they embark on great migrations,

      beat against the glass of earth’s cage.

      A Dawn Trail

      Each day we come earlier, searching for that hush

      no freeway hum will shatter,

      when the morning wind blows all sound

      into the next creek

      and even our footsteps are muffled

      by

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1