Ruth is an award-winning British poet and writer. She has published eight poetry collections, including an internationally acclaimed lyric biography of her great-great-grandfather Charles Darwin; a wide range of non-fiction, and a novel, hailed in Britain and India for its nature writing. She is Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London, and presents Poetry Workshop, a BBC Radio 4 series on writing poems. Her new collection The Mara Crossing includes prose and poetry about migration.
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Ruth’s new book THE MARA CROSSING is called after a river in Kenya forded by wildebeest at the end of their annual migration. The poems are introduced by interludes of prose and the theme is migration, from cells to souls: trees, animals and people. Migration and immigration in their biological and historical context.

REVIEW IN THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY
“The question of migration, and all its implications, pulls us gently through this thoughtful and often really quite magical mix of prose and poetry… Just as fascinating as Padel’s central theme is the insight that she gives us into poetry, or rather, into the creation of a poem.” http://ind.pn/xohDRk

“A major meditation on migration – a poet’s book to the core, a passionate exploration of her subject, proving that pressures on cells, bodies, creatures (human and other), the planet itself, are fit and essential matter for poetry.” Jo Shapcott

READ themes from THE MARA CROSSING at http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/visions-of-new-life-how-migration-led-to-the-formation-of-human-society-6282679.html

LISTEN to themes arising from it at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00mn5lw, join in the Facebook conversation, http://tinyurl.com/ykx3nzw and follow the comments on Twitter @BBCTheForum.

This is THE MARA CROSSING’s opening poem

Born in a deepsea vent, synthesized
by lightning in a reducing atmosphere
or carried here by meteorite: we’re all
from somewhere else. Algae, first
self-replicating molecule on Earth,

pulls carbon from organic substrate,
performs the world’s first magic,
photo-synthesis of air to oxygen,
and creates copies of herself, uncountable
as starlings flocking or the pure gold bricks

Sheba sent to Solomon by mule.
Cell in the air, on the rocks. Song
hoping to be heard in a heart cut open.
Little Blue-Green, dreaming of pattern
and form. Tiny horseman of apocalypse.

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