The Huntress

The Huntress is a 2005 volume of poetry by French-born British poet Pascale Petit. The second volume in a series, it follows Petit’s book The Zoo Father, using her characteristic blend of magical realism and social realism to illuminate the many metaphors that govern unconscious life in the modern day. The book was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, one of the highest awards in British poetry, in the year of its publication. The poems also draw from some of Petit’s own experiences, exploring the relationships and power struggles that defined her.

The poems in The Zoo Follower feature an eclectic host of characters. The main character, a daughter haunted by a mentally ill mother, looks back on her childhood through the constantly shifting lens of memory. Her mother takes many forms, including an Aztek goddess, a snake, a Tibetan singing bowl, a praying mantis, a stalagmite, and a ghost orchid—the latter an extremely rare and beautiful flower found only in deep wilderness. These forms are neither wholly positive nor negative, coloring a complex portrait of the mother and her relationship to her daughter. The book’s long, central poem, “At the Gate of Secrets,” seems to depict the daughter trying to escape her mother, who is pursuing her in the form of the huntress. Here, the daughter takes the form of a stag. Each time the huntress draws close, the stag evades her arrows, leaping farther into the forest. This poem defines the tension that exists between the daughter and mother: it is both predatory and graceful, physical and spiritual.

Another poem, “My Mother’s Perfume,” reflects the various traces, both physical and psychic, that the girl’s mother leaves behind. The girl describes her mother’s perfume, which seemed to defy the laws of physics: It “used to arrive long before she did.” It quickly becomes clear that what the girl is talking about is not actually the perfume, but her memory of it. She remarks, “Here I am forty years on, still half-expecting her”—the anticipation she associates with the scent has never dissipated. At the culmination of the poem, the girl resigns herself to the fact that she will never be close to her mother because of the many negative associations she has of her, from the cloister of domestic life to the emotional abuse she suffered at her hand. The Huntress, therefore, can be read as neither an attack on nor a celebration of the girl’s mother; rather, it illuminates the dual love and hate of mother-daughter relationships.