The vivid colours of Pascale Petit's five previous collections reflect the route she took to poetry  through painting, sculpture and the Royal College of Art.Her tutor there said Petit's studio reminded him of Frida Kahlo's Mexican home. Kahlo can be a demonically inspiring figure for other women artists (witness Barbara Kingsolver's novel The Lacuna, winner of this year's Orange prize), but Petit used this potent connection in an exemplary way. She took her time, allowing Kahlo to work quietly in her imagination over many years. When she turned from sculpture to poetry, she allowed Kahlo in only while writing her third collection, The Zoo Father (2001). This book established Petit as a potent poet of myth, imagery and nature in her own right and freed her to take off to Mexico and knock on the door of the house where Kahlo had lived and worked.

Petit's first response to Kahlo was 14 poems in The Wounded Deer (2005). She thought that was it, but Kahlo had only just got going. While Petit was writing new collections (The Huntress, 2005; The Treekeeper's Tale, 2008), more Kahlo poems forced their way in. The result is this arresting collection, What the Water Gave Me, built around Kahlo's oeuvre and called after a 1938 painting which propelled Kahlo to international attention. André Breton visited Mexico, saw the painting unfinished, labelled Kahlo a surrealist and arranged a show in Paris.

Like all Kahlo's work, this painting manifests her lifelong battle with pain. In English, it is also called What I Saw in the Water and is a self-portrait of the artist, or rather her bottom third, in the bath: a catoptromantic vision of what life had thrown at Kahlo by the age of 31. As Petit makes Kahlo say, it reveals "my half-drowned thoughts bobbing around my legs". The toes point up from the water but also down to floating symbols of her life  an empty Mexican dress, a seashell full of bullet-holes, two lesbian lovers, Kahlo's parents and an island on which a volcano belches forth "The Empire State Building spewing gangrene / over my shin". On flanks of the volcano sit a skeleton, a dead bird (a "giant / one-legged quetzel pierced by a tree") and a man in a loin cloth holding a rope. This rope, tied to two rocks, creates at the painting's centre a taut diamond whose base is the neck of a broken girl floating, Ophelia-like, in grey water.

Dominating the painting are those terrifying toes. As a child Kahlo had both polio and spina bifida, which was only diagnosed when she was 23. "Since I was six my right foot / has been bandaged in a boat," says another Petit poem. "But it's only today that the doctors / add a toy sail and smash / a tequila bottle against it." When Kahlo was 18, her pelvis was smashed in a bus crash and a broken rail pierced her abdomen and uterus. Of the 30-plus subsequent operations she endured, most were on her back, right leg and right foot and the wreckage in the painting is densest over her right leg. Between the toes of her right foot is a bleeding crack.

Among the other images of pain bobbing in that bath is Kahlo's marriage to the artist Diego Rivera. (The man, presumably, holding that rope.) They were briefly divorced but remarried and their relationship was always volcanic. Kahlo said he showed her "the revolutionary sense of life and the true sense of colour". There is also a terrible absence of babies in this bathwater, for because of the bus crash Kahlo was unable to bear children and suffered several agonising miscarriages.

Each of Petit's poems is called after one of Kahlo's paintings and touches on events in Kahlo's luridly colourful life. Revolutionary colours jump out at you ("the blue sting, the red ache / how art works on the pain spectrum"), but especially Mexican gold, reds, oranges and yellows. "Insecticide yellow" and "ruby mandragora" of the "life flower" in a poem about being unable to bear a child. The sun sits on her bedside table "like an orange spider", Diego takes mistresses, including Kahlo's sister, to a "dirty yellow hotel room". When he leaves, Kahlo cuts off her hair and sits "on the crazy-yellow chair" watching her "snake-locks rise / from the floor". Her "red boot" has "bells, / to cover my prosthesis".

But animals are the centre too. Kahlo's Blue House is in Coyoacán, a suburb of Mexico City whose name means "Place of Coyotes", and Petit's work has animals in common with Kahlo as well as vibrant colour and life-defining pain. Her poems pick up Kahlo's self-definition via Mexican fauna. "Self-Portrait with Monkey and Parrot", "Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird". Painting is an encounter with the animal: "The bristles on my brushes work / like furtive birds . . . /// As if / the leaves are hiding a forest floor / where I have buried a troop of monkeys / alive. As if the only sound in this / whole house is the breathing of animals . . ."

Petit's collection is not a verse biography, but a hard-hitting, palette-knife evocation of the effect that bus crash had on Kahlo's life and work. "And this is how I started painting. / Time stretched out its spectrum / and screeched its brakes." WH Auden, in his elegy for Yeats, tells the Irish poet: "Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry." Petit's collection, exploring the way trauma hurts an artist into creation, celebrates the rebarbative energy with which Kahlo redeemed pain and transformed it into paint.

Ruth Padel's Where the Serpent Lives is published by Little, Brown.