P: Pascale Petit

Sleeping Black Jaguar

I was going to begin here by describing Pascale Petit’s book ‘Fauverie’ as one of my favourite poetry collections of the last 10 years, but then I looked it up and it was published in 2014. So of the last 11 years then, instead. If I speak as a writer, Pascale Petit is one of those poets I might put in the same personal category of someone like Elizabeth Bishop or Tiana Clark in my previous essays – a writer who I love to read and hugely admire, but I don’t particularly have much in common with in terms of my own style/subject matter/goals. I just like that this book exists and that I can go back to it. She’s an absolutely brutal writer, or maybe I should say she’s a writer preoccupied with brutality, and it’s probably appropriate that she’s paired with Plath in this project – both write about things that feel unsayable, with a kind of uncompromising way of facing up to horror and violence that somehow also manages to contain wryness, dark humour, tenderness. Her most disturbing poem, Ortolan, is one I couldn’t bring myself to dive into here but I’d recommend seeking it out if you want to spend the rest of the day with an unsettled feeling in the pit of your stomach. (And who wouldn’t want that?)

Today’s poem is Sleeping Black Jaguar and you can read the poem here: Three Evocative Poems from Pascale Petit’s Award Winning Collection, Fauverie | Seren Books Blog

Sleeping Black Jaguar

I want to use this space the title to consider influences and context here: this poem comes from a wider collection in which a speaker works through memory and trauma about the death of her abusive father. The ‘Fauverie’ in the collection’s title refers to the big cat house in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. The jaguar in the book is named Aramis and appears often. Aramis is often associated, sometimes directly and metaphorically, with the father and his violence. I think the poem stands alone *without* that knowledge, as a poem about a jaguar in a zoo, but it’s worth considering that context.

Additionally, I think there are two antecedents to this poem that Petit indirectly and directly pays homage to. Firstly we have to be reminded of the Ted Hughes poem ‘Jaguar’, which is also a study of a caged jaguar in a zoo, which also considers/admires the animal’s raw power and dignity set against the fact of its physical confinement. But both of these Jaguar poems are also direct descendants of William Blake’s “The Tyger”, which fires breathless and fearful rhetorical questions towards the animal about the mysteries of the identity and motivations of its sublime Creator.

1.
A solar eclipse – his fur
seems to veil light,
the smoulder

of black rosettes
a zoo of sub-atoms
I try to tame –

Only eleven words in that first stanza, but Petit is setting up a lot. We were right to interpret the title of the poem as an indicator that we were going to get close observation of this animal, and that this close observation would take us somewhere conceptually interesting. I wonder if that principle of animal poetry is something that transcends eras and styles, no matter whether you’re a Romantic or a Modernist or a Confessional or anything else.

Comparing the jaguar to an eclipse through the blackness of its fur is a strong opening, isn’t it? An unexpected vehicle for the simile, but one which immediately gives the animal a kind of supernatural power. The first think you notice about the jaguar is the intensity of the blackness of its fur, so much so that it seems to do the impossible – ‘veil light’. We are being situated immediately in extremity.

What is the ‘smoulder/of black rosettes’ about? The rosettes remind me of the rosettes on Bishop’s caught ‘Fish’ a few months ago, although I think that’s more likely to be just me rather than a deliberate allusion. But maybe there’s a similar thing going on – the rosettes as conferred symbols of victory. The jaguar has been *awarded* victory within four lines by the poet here – so then why does she go on to say that she is trying to ‘tame’ it? It’s interesting that this sets up a kind of antagonistic relationship with the subject – is there going to be a kind of battle here? If so, I think we’re already set up to see the speaker lose this battle, given that the jaguar seems to be as powerful as celestial bodies, can ‘veil light’ and already has the marks of victory upon it.

I love the intricacy of calling the jaguar ‘a zoo of sub-atoms’. The jaguar is in a zoo, but it also *is* a zoo on an atomic level. It is both the captive and the cage itself. Interestingly, we have something from a modern poet that we’re *not* seeing the likes of Blake, Bishop or Hughes do, which is to take the notion of observation to a microscopic, scientific level. What will we see if we consider the jaguar as its own universe? Blake would approve.

tritium, lepton, anti-proton.
They collide
as if smashed inside

a particle accelerator.
But it’s just Aramis sleeping,
twitching himself back

to the jungle, where he leaps
into the pool of a spiral
galaxy, to catch a fish.

I don’t know exactly what tritiums, leptons and anti-protons are, and I feel too old to learn. I know they’re sub-atomic particles though, the fundamental building blocks of matter. I love how the speaker continues to ‘see’ the Jaguar as this, as a miracle of nuclear forces, and if the jaguar was ‘an eclipse’ earlier, now it’s a ‘particle accelerator’. The collisions, to me, evoke but the violence but also the kind of magical power of the animal, that this violence is what it’s made of, and what we’re all made of, on that most basic level.

And then she jerks us back from this flight of fancy – ‘But it’s just Aramis, sleeping’. Oh. Right. The jaguar is back inside the cage, and it’s only on the microscopic level that this spectacular stuff is happening. He’s a sleeping cat, twitching. But then the fantastical is also happening on the ‘dream’ level too – in his dream he’s doing what wild animals do, leaping and hunting in a ‘spiral galaxy’.

There’s so much going on with this jaguar in so few words in part one of this poem. Why are we observing this sleeping animal, and what are we seeing? We’re seeing his awesome animal power. We’re seeing him as a potential adversary to be tamed. We’re seeing the fundamental violence at his core being on an atomic level. We’re seeing him as the sleeping cat that he ‘really’ is. We’re seeing him as he sees himself in his dreams, as a hunter who is free, not just in the jungle, but in the pool of a ‘galaxy’, as a kind of mythical jaguar-god. All at the same time. Ace.

2.
Later, the keeper tells me
Aramis has had surgery
for swallowing

a hose-head
where his hank of beef
was lodged. But

I really like the jarring change in tone in part two, so jarring that it has to be marked as almost a different poem. All of that awe has gone and we get a picture of the jaguar as… what? Almost foolish? Accident-prone? Just the object of a day’s mundane work for the zookeeper. I like those flat, deadpan Anglo-Saxon sounds ‘hose-head…hank of beef’ as opposed to those spacey Latinate leptons and galaxies from earlier.

But…

what vet could take
a scalpel to this
dreaming universe?

What hand could shave
that pelt, to probe
the organs

of dark matter, untwist
time’s intestines
and stitch

night’s belly
together again, only
to return him to a cage?

I think what she does to Blake’s “Tyger” poem here to end her own poem is extremely deliberate, very clever and funny, and also a profound twist on the original that isn’t just working on the level of the knowing postmodern wink. In “The Tyger”, Blake asks the tyger who created it, with an onrush of rhetorical questions that grow increasingly awestruck - “…What the hand, dare seize the fire?/And what shoulder, & what art,/Could twist the sinews of thy heart?/And when thy heart began to beat./What dread hand? & what dread feet?/What the hammer? what the chain,/In what furnace was thy brain?”

Blake’s questions are about the power of the universe’s invisible creative force – the tyger is spectacular as an animal but is not the supreme being and is not really the subject of the questions, since the questions are all about who created it. The spectacular things in this poem are the unseen, unimaginable ‘hand’ and ‘shoulder’ of the all-powerful creator.

I suppose when Petit’s speaker asks “what vet”, we *could* see this as rhetorical awe at the power of the vet, but I don’t think that’s the point here. I think she’s flipping things around: here we know who the questions are about – the “vet” with his “scalpel” – a human figure, not a mysterious creator. In this poem, then, it actually *is* the animal that is the mysterious miracle – the jaguar is a ‘dreaming universe’ with ‘organs of dark matter’, ‘night’s belly’ and ‘time’s intestines’. All of the power resides within the animal itself, and the speaker does not appear to be interested in the mystery of creation as much as the awe of both scientific and imaginative observation.

So if that “what vet” isn’t awe at the vet, what is it? I think the ‘what vet’ is an indictment of human arrogance and lack of imagination. She’s done something very clever earlier in the poem by occasionally dragging us back to the ‘reality’ of the jaguar amid those spectacular awestruck descriptions – she *has* reminded us that it’s ‘just Aramis’ who ‘swallowed a hose-head’. That’s how the vet and the zookeeper can do their jobs – when they look at the jaguar, that’s all they see. That’s how they can put the jaguar back in its cage after the operation. So the poem is about perception, and the ending of the poem, then, becomes about the transformative act of empathy that happens through close observation, whether that observation is scientific or poetically imaginative – if you truly *saw* what the jaguar was, what any living thing is, how could you treat it like a machine to be fixed and then cage it back up?

Read it again here: Three Evocative Poems from Pascale Petit’s Award Winning Collection, Fauverie | Seren Books Blog