Pascale Petit was born in Paris, and grew up in France and Wales. Her collections include The Huntress and The Zoo Father. Both were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and were books of the year in the Times Literary Supplement. The Zoo Father was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art and she has worked as poetry editor of Poetry London, is currently the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Middlesex University and tutors for Oxford University and Tate Modern.

Already well known for the fierce confessional imagery of her first three books, The Treekeeper's Tale points towards another facet of the poet's gift, an intense feeling for the natural world, allied with a personal response to historical incidents and to other lands. The title section of this four-part collection adopts the giant coast redwood trees in California as a particular talisman. Lyrical, resonant, strange and imaginative, these poems echo in the mind and leave an indelible impression of the mysterious atmosphere of the redwood forests. The second section, Afterlives, takes us on journeys to the past, as in the burial of a Siberian priestess, and on trips to other places including China, Nepal and Kazakhstan. The colourful paintings of the German expressionist Franz Marc, such as the famous red and blue horses series, provide the key to the third section, War Horse, where dramatic imagery of the horses blends and contrasts with the tragic fate of Europe during World War One. The final part, The Chrysanthemum Lantern, features sensitive translations from Chinese originals.

"deeply entrancing […] filled with vivid poems of colour and nature, inseparable features of Petit’s art. Her exploration of nature is startlingly original, even drastic, ways, drives deep into a visionary world."
The North 44