Poet and musician Humphrey Astley is enthralled by the work of Pascale Petit at a reading at Oxford's Albion Beatnik Bookstore

I first became a fan of Pascale Petit's poetry when my undergrad tutor, the poet Helen Kidd, loaned me a copy of Petit's 2001 book The Zoo Father.

The collection is striking not only for its subject matter – the abuse the author suffered at the hands of her father – but for the skill with which she handles it, transforming self and other into animals so that she may study them, in an almost scientific (one might say zoological) way.

I admired the book so much that I wrote a clumsy review of it, though it's safe to say my compliments were a drop in the ocean of praise that surrounded The Zoo Father, which was championed by The Poetry Book Society and The TLS, among many other major organisations.

It seemed serendipitous then that when Pascale was in town promoting her recent collection Fauverie – which revisits the subject of her father – another former tutor, the poet Jenny Lewis, was kind enough to arrange an interview with Pascale between their afternoon teaching at The Poet's House and an evening reading at The Albion Beatnik Bookstore in Jericho.

I meet them at nearby restaurant Manos, and manage to fumble my way through enough questions to give Pascale a chance to illuminate her work. I wonder, for example, if her training as a sculptor plays a part in her writing.

"I'd be a totally different poet if I hadn't trained as a sculptor," she says without hesitation. "I don't make sculptures anymore, but I try to make sculptures in poems. I think of them as objects."

This will make complete sense to anyone who's read Pascale's compact, contoured poetry, and brings to mind Pound's assertion that in free verse, the unit is not the word or the line, but the strophe – the block.

Our discussion moves from form to content, and Pascale is candid about how she approached the material of The Zoo Father and Fauverie. I ask if her decision to write about such trauma was a kind of therapy, to which she replies, "I didn't have a choice... I didn't think people would be interested in what had happened to me, but it gave me an opportunity to write about human nature at its worst."

Is this her way of trying to make sense of events? No, it's more than that: "It's trying to change the situation by writing about it... We have to ask what can be done about it – what can be done with it."

It's from Fauverie that Pascale will be reading tonight, and before we head to the venue I ask if she enjoys giving readings. "I enjoy it and I don't enjoy it," she replies. "I'm a very shy person, so it's quite hard for me to read."

She admits that when she attends poetry readings, she can "find it really hard to concentrate"– but it's this knowledge from experience that makes her respectful of her own audiences.

"Mainly I just don't want to bore them... What I aim for when I read my poetry is to try to get the trance of when I wrote it."

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She agrees, though, that it's a slippery slope for a poet who (unlike a declamatory slam performer) speaks in soft, flowing tones – you run the risk of sending the room to sleep. I have a feeling this won't be the case tonight, however.

We arrive at The Albion Beatnik to be greeted by arch-owner Dennis, who's pouring decent wine and playing Anouar Brahem (this bodes well). I'm glad to see it's a full house, and gladder still to see Greg Sweetnam in attendance – it's another nice coincidence, since I first met him when he co-taught a class with the aforementioned Helen. When the time comes, Jenny welcomes the crowd and introduces Pascale, who reads from a copy of Fauverie. Perfectly, the eyes of Aramis – the black jaguar who broods at the centre of the collection and adorns its cover – are fixed on the audience throughout.

Pascale begins with the opening poem of the book, Arrival of the Electric Eel, whose titular creature is an example of the poet's trademark meta-fauna, representing as it does the shock and appeal of the alien: "I know you must be surprised, it says,/ but I will die soon and want to make contact."

The poem's ambivalence is suggested also in the "face pierced by jaguar whiskers/ to make me brave", lines that display Pascale's knack for the latent violence of verbs.

In Kissing a Jaguar, we get a strong sense of the collection's undercurrent: "The next morning I floated along the pavements of Paris/ and found myself in the zoo./ All paths lead to the Fauverie/ and this is where I come, again and again,// to where Aramis has stars for a coat/ and his mouth is a sky-gate/ the jaguar shaman climbs through."

What I see here are rituals, both personal and cultural. But what are rituals for? I have a theory that forms (artistic rituals, so to speak) are powerful and important because their patterns are like little glimpses of infinity, though I'll stop short of using that unfashionable word 'transcendence'.

I certainly see a kind of ritual in Pascale's Portrait of My Father as... series, in which he is made to take on various forms (there's that word again). What better way to make sense of a person than to dress them in different skins and see how they fit? In his turn "...as a North China Leopard", she imagines him testing the limits of his new world by "risk[ing] an altitude/ that could freeze him to a carcass of stars," - another of her brilliant cosmic allusions.

Including these pieces, Pascale reads around a dozen poems before giving the floor to Jenny, who leads in an open mic. There are quite a few speakers, many of them the talented students of The Poet's House, and I join in by reciting a poem in a "scary" (Jenny's word) drawl that is less about affect than Dennis's wine, if I'm honest.

By the time the mic is over, Pascale has had to run and catch a train, while Greg and I are able to leave at a more leisurely pace, strolling up Little Clarendon Street discussing the vagaries of publication.

I recall Pascale's advice from earlier: "Be yourself," was her uncynical recommendation. "That's hard sometimes, because there are fashions. But you ought to be the next fashion, you ought to set the next fashion."

Like her poetry, she makes it sound so easy.

* Pascale Petit's The Zoo Father and Fauverie are published by Seren Books. She teaches at Tate Modern and The Poetry School.

Humphrey 'Huck' Astley is a poet-singer-songwriter based in Oxford. He is the author of the three-part album and PRS for Music Foundation stage show Alexander the Great: a Folk Operetta.