Editorial Note by Max Wallis
In My Mother’s Provençal Dress, Pascale Petit returns to one of her great themes: the mother’s presence lingering in absence, a fabric of love and accusation stitched into the landscape itself.
The poem begins with theft – “I stole my mother’s Provençal dress while she was in hospital” – but what follows is not just an act of rebellion. The speaker inhabits the dress like a vineyard, a landscape stitched from kermes oak and cicada-thrum. It is a garment, but also inheritance, burden, and escape.
The poem refuses easy resolution. We are carried from art school canteen to Cardiff station toilets, from the glamour of being asked out by a painter to the punishment of being called “evil over and over.” The dress is worn, mended, hidden, torn; it survives even when the mother cannot forgive. Petit’s syntax mirrors this secret life – long, winding sentences, as if to prolong the time the speaker has with the garment, with the freedom it affords.
What I love is how the dress becomes porous with the natural world: “vines drinking oxygen, turning water to wine,” the lizard with “sky blue eyes” that watches over the daughter. Petit’s imagery moves from Provençal light to Welsh railway toilets without losing its shimmer. This is the Aftershock we look for – a moment that begins as one story (the theft of a dress) and expands until it holds memory, shame, survival, and transformation.
When I first read this, I felt the shock of recognition. How we take what we need to survive, how the objects of our childhood become stitched with possibility. This poem understands that memory does not lie flat on the page – it grows vines, it drinks oxygen, it breathes.
