What The Water Gave Me

Welcome to What the Water Gave Me (2010) by Pascale Petit (Seren), ISBN 9781854115157 — a poetry collection with a title that sounds serene and gently aquatic, right up until you realise water doesn’t “give” in the way gift shops do. Water gives like weather gives: mysteriously, intensely, sometimes beautifully, sometimes with a sharp undertow. Which is exactly the energy this book carries.

Pascale Petit writes poems that feel like richly coloured currents: lyrical, vivid, and full of sudden shifts where myth, memory, family, and the natural world collide in the same line. You’ll get the sense of a speaker wading into deep personal territory — identity, inheritance, desire, loss — and letting the imagery do the heavy lifting. These poems don’t so much explain as conjure. They have that good-poetry quality where you finish a piece and think, “I’m not sure I can paraphrase that,” but you’re absolutely sure it did something to you.

The irony is that the collection is published by Seren — a name that suggests calm — while the poems themselves can be anything but. There’s often a fierce, luminous intensity here, a willingness to look directly at complicated relationships and carry them through surreal, mythic, or elemental landscapes. Water becomes metaphor, archive, mirror, and threat — a way of talking about what can’t be held, what can’t be fixed, what keeps moving even when you’d like it to stop.

And because this is poetry, “what the water gave me” might be beauty, yes — but it might also be wreckage, revelation, or the kind of clarity that arrives inconveniently, like a wave just as you’ve put your shoes on. Petit’s language is sensuous and exacting; it can be lush without being foggy, strange without being random. The lines feel crafted, but alive — as if the poems are both carefully built and slightly feral.

Condition: Good, meaning this copy has been read and handled — likely by someone who picked it up expecting gentle lyricism and then found themselves unexpectedly struck by an image they couldn’t shake. A little wear is perfectly fitting for a poetry book: not pristine, but lived with, carried around, returned to.

Perfect for:

• readers who like contemporary poetry with mythic/elemental power,

• anyone drawn to lush imagery and emotional sharpness,

• fans of collections that reward rereading,

• and people who enjoy being slightly undone by a well-placed line.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, naturally — because where else would a quietly beautiful, slightly wild Seren poetry collection end up, if not waiting patiently to pull the next reader under, just a little, and then set them back down changed.

Keep browsing: See more Poetry books Other books by Pascale Petit