Published in Sunday Telegraph Magazine, Seven

November 12th 2006

I was born in an attic. My first memory is being held up to look out of its window at a wild creature, which was looking back at me. An owl, roosting in a chimney-top abovce the mews. Only after I’d written ten books did I realize that wildness, and wild animals, lie at the heart of what I feel about writing.

My father taught Greek, my mother worked in cancer research till the children came. I was a shy child, happiest with books or exploring woods with the dog. My grandmother Nora Barlow was Charles Darwin’s grand-daughter: our bookshelves were awash with wildlife. Deep in suburban London, I felt the jungle – where I would naturally, like Bagheera, melt into shadows of the trees – was my proper home.

Wild animals also drew me into poetry. Always by my bed was The Book of a Thousand Poems. The section I liked best, whose poems I knew by heart, was “All Creatures Great and Small”. Wild animals were clearly poetry’s right subject. Blake was a good teacher.

I was baffled, though by adult writing longhand – all those joined-up letters, as arcane as grown-ups themselves. I thought, “’l’ll never understand”. But in poems I saw that words could stalk you, hide, then present themselves as dappled, fugitive, playful. A poem could be both the jungle and the tiger. Then my father taught me the Greek alphabet. But delight turned to despair when he said I only knew the letters, not the language. What I longed for, I think, and this was always linked to writing, was what Darwin called “tangle”. Shadowy, interlinking intricacies with a hidden life within, In words as well as woods.

My first poems were published in the year I gave up teaching university Greek in order to write. Other books followed. About rock music and Greek myth. About Greek tragedy and the mind. Six poetry collections. Then, in India, I walked in tropical forest for the first time and felt alive as never before. The tiger was the meaning of the forest. I expected to see it, as readers expect to see a poem’s meaning.

Well, I didn’t; at first. But there were other entrancements. Deer in silver mist, leopard tracks, a racket-tailed drongo trailing long blobby tail feathers as if pursued by flying lollipops. The magical alphabet of the forest. As in a poem, every detail was mysteriously connected. This was where I’d always longed to be. I’d learned the letters; now I wanted the language. Could I write a book about tigers?

I’d no idea what I was getting into. There are authoritative books on tigers by naturalists, scientists, conservationists. What could I contribute?
Well, maybe how it feels, as a denizen of the easy West, to walk where tigers walk, from thorn-forest to snowy taiga and mangrove swamp: Nepal, Bangladesh, Russia, China, Bhutan, South East Asia. I could bring what I knew about, poetry and myth; could learn the science; and maybe add my personal life so readers would identify with my nervous amateur gaze. I’d just ended a long relationship. I could counterpoint remote Asian forest with the familiar world of relationships: London parties prowled dangerously by your ex.

“Are you going to write about tigers from the conservation viewpoint,” asked a journalist at one of these, ” or will you be more objective?”
What, I asked, did he mean by “objective”? Did he think scientific data was not objectively derived?

I realized how little people know of what is being lost every day; of brilliant field scientists, working from all-too-objective facts, struggling to protect. There is now, says George Schaller, one of the greatest of them, “a great dying”.

Wildlife crime is third biggest, globally, after drugs and arms. I was writing, I found, about the people who generously shared their knowledge with me while protecting tigers. In India, a hundred guards are mutilated or killed every year by poachers, In Bangkok an ex commando, who teaches South East Asian forest guards to fight poachers, said, “We’re the defenders of the wild.”

Every day these frontline defenders struggle with corrupt politicians making money from forests, corrupt forest officers nodding through the building of roads or mines in supposedly protected forest. Everything comes down to corruprion and greed in the end, Defenders risk their lives against armed poachers; face time-wasting lawsuits filed by forest officers trying to cover up poaching by prosecuting for trespass the scientists observing it. Yes, I’d kayacked, terrified, down rapids on Laotian rivers, got stung by scorpions, walked up Sumatran volcanos over fresh tiger pugmarks in cobra-filled equatorial forest, and seen wonderful tigers, while trying to do what both poetry and science demand – say it precisely as you saw it. But I’d also stepped into a worldwide battle for the wild.

Above all, against China. The Environmental Investigation Agency has just published a report on the tigerskin trade. Huge numbers of fresh skins (tigers from India, mainly) are currently sold openly in China and China-controlled Tibet. The Dalai Lama has condemned this, so Tibetans are trying to suppress it. But not China, where denial is the name of the game. Last month in Geneva, at a conference of CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, a Chinese government delegate who thought he wasn’t being watched was spotted by ab ex-poiceman dumping piles of this appalling report in a fat Swiss skip.

That’s how seriously China takes its responsibility to the wild. Wild tigers everywhere are threatened by poaching driven by Chinese appetite for illegal tigerskin and (for Chinese medicine) tiger bone.

“Enjoy the wild places of the world while they’re around,” an Indian conservationist emailed me recently, in despair at his own government’s forest policy. “They won’t be for long.”

But they could remain, the tigers and their forests. I learned that, too. Awareness makes a difference, pressure makes a difference; I’ve seen it happen. The great dying is not inevitable.

I’m writing on king cobras now. Because snake are creatures of earth and earth is what it’s all about. Because in wilderness, says Thoreau, “is the preservation of the world”.

Prize-winning poet Ruth Padel is Chair of the Poetry Society and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her recent collection The Soho Leopard was shortlsted for the T S Eliot Prize. Her travel-memoir Tigers in Red Weather has just appeared in paperback.

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Skinning the Cat: Crime and Politics of the Big Cat Skin Trade is published by the Environmental Investigation Agency, 62 Upper St, London N1 ONY 0207 354 7960,

ukinfo@eia-international.org

http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poet/item/13554

© Jemima Kuhfeld

“Ruth Padel combines two major gifts. She is a distinguished poet and a quite exceptional reader of the poetry of others, with a delightful skill in explanation and the instinct of a caring, clearsighted guide to how poetry works and why it matters.”(George Steiner)

Amongst her many plaudits, Ruth Padel was the winner of the Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition in 1996. She was Chair of the Poetry Society from 2004 to 2006 and in 2009, for the Poetry Society’s Centenary, she is to be one of the judges of the National Poetry Competition. Her long-standing relationship and support of the Poetry Society is a sign of her commitment to fostering the appreciation of poetry across all readerships and potential readerships. A number of the poems in our selection for February 2009 are taken from her forthcoming Darwin: A Life in Poems, published this month by Chatto.

Ruth Padel a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Zoological Society of London. This latter connection is related to her ancestry; she is the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin. The influence of his research into the natural world is impossible to miss throughout her oeuvre. Writing in The Telegraph, Andrew O’Hagan described her as “A poet and scholar with a beautifully patient understanding, reminiscent of Ted Hughes, of how the natural world invests itself in our experience.” From trekking through jungles to investigating wild tigers in their natural habitat in her travel memoir, Tigers in Red Weather – which was shortlisted in the US for the Kiriyama Prize – to her forthcoming collection of poetry, Darwin: A Life in Poems (Chatto & Windus, February 2009), her writing is rich with flora and fauna, with natural sciences and investigations into the philosophical dilemmas raised by Darwin’s work.

In her own words, “Ruth was born in an attic in Wimpole Street in London, and her first job was playing viola in Westminster Abbey for £5. She has sung in the Heraklion Town Choir on Crete, an Istanbul nightclub and the choir of St Eustache in Paris, has helped find and excavate a Minoan road leading out of the palace of Knossos and is currently Poet in Residence at Somerset House.” She studied Classics at Oxford, Paris and Berlin, and has taught at many universities, including Ancient Greek at Oxford, Opera at Princeton, Myth in Buenos Aires, as well teaching horse-riding in Berlin. In 1985 she left the academies to become a full time writer. Music and performance are major aspects to her life, from playing viola to choir-singing and music journalism. All these details, and the many more that crop up about her life in interviews and essays, reveal an extremely rich variety of experiences, interests, skills and activities.

She has published six poetry collections, including Rembrandt Would Have Loved You, Voodoo Shop and The Soho Leopard, all shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. She received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2004 and has been shortlisted for the Whitbread Award. She has also published two much-loved books on reading contemporary poetry, 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem and The Poem and the Journey, which arose from a column in The Independent.

Her writing is marked by a richness of detail and music. A glass of wine is never simply that: it is an evocative Chablis, with a full complement of sensory data. Similarly, the lush details in a poem like ‘The Forest, the Corrupt Official and a Bowl of Penis Soup’:

Black tree stumps cool on the mountain,
sawmills slide out planks a hundred an hour
and white ash blooms over the river
while the courtier treats the General
to tiger penis soup, five hundred linu a bowl.

Her writing never fails to delight with its array of visual detail and aural dexterity. As Jeanette Winterson put it, “I love Ruth Padel’s poetry. She is sexy, strong, rhythmic, passionate, fully alive and a whiz with words.”

© George Ttoouli

Bibliography

Darwin: A Life in Poems, Chatto & Windus, London, February 2009
The Soho Leopard, Chatto & Windus, London, 2004
Voodoo Shop, Chatto & Windus, London, 2002
Rembrandt Would Have Loved You, Chatto & Windus, London, 1998
Fusewire, Chatto & Windus, London, 1996
Angel, Bloodaxe Books, Tarset, 1993
Summer Snow, Hutchinson, London, 1990
Alibi, The Many Press, 1985

Darwin’s Descendant, on Origin of Poetry

New York Times Apr 20, 2009 By CHARLES McGRATH

The British poet Ruth Padel, a favorite to be named the Oxford Professor of Poetry this spring, is Charles Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter, though for much of her life she has preferred not to dwell on the connection.

“A feature of Darwins is that they’re quite reticent,” she said last week during a visit to New York that included a stop at the American Museum of Natural History.
Her new book, however, just out in the United States, is called “Darwin: A Life in Poems” (Alfred A. Knopf), timed to coincide with his bicentenary this year, and it’s a verse biography of her celebrated ancestor that reads at times like a family album. Many of the poems embed Darwin’s own words, taken from his books, letters and notebooks and annotated with marginal commentary resembling that in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

A poem about bleakness and depression occasioned by the death of Darwin’s favorite daughter, Anne, from scarlet fever, for example, incorporates some famous lines from Chapter 4 of “On the Origin of Species”:

He sees a parade of huge black dinosaurs with smoky breath.
“Nature is prodigal with time. She scrutinizes every muscle,
vessel, nerve. Every habit, instinct, shade
of constitution. There will be no caprice, no favouring.”
In other poems Ms. Padel (pronounced puh-DELL) puts herself inside the naturalist’s head to imagine the Brazilian jungle, where
he leans on slippery roots like fins veloured
in moss, stippled pink where the moss has rubbed.
Like tubers – or a tree-gland – hard as mumps.

In still others she imagines the young Darwin gazing at an erotic nude painting or writes from the point of view of his wife, Emma, lying in bed and thinking about the hairs growing, “like a crescent moon,” under her husband’s arm. And there is even a poem giving a publisher’s verdict on the “Origin” manuscript:

“‘Make it a manual on pigeon-breeding! Forget the rest.

Everyone loves pigeons – it’d be reviewed

by every journal in the land.”

Ms. Padel’s grandmother Nora Barlow was one of the earliest Darwin scholars; she edited her grandfather’s letters and notebooks and restored to his autobiography some controversial lines, dropped at Emma’s request by Darwin’s son Francis, in which Darwin called Christianity a “damnable doctrine” and said, “I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true.”

Ms. Barlow lived to be 104, Ms. Padel said, and her granddaughter grew up visiting the Barlow house, which had a big garden and was filled with books about plants and animals. And it was her grandmother who gave Ms. Padel one of the key themes in “Darwin: A Life in Poems”: the sorrow that Darwin’s theories gave his wife, who remained a religious believer.

“I was looking after her one rainy Cambridge summer when she was pushing 100,” Ms. Padel said of her grandmother. “She had lost her short-term memory, but her long-term memory was very keen. She politely asked me what I was working on, which at the time was my Ph.D. thesis at Oxford, about images of emotion in Greek poetry. ‘That’s very interesting,’ she said, and then started talking about Darwin’s book about the expression of emotion in man and animals. Five minutes later she’d ask me again and she’d have a completely different association with Darwin. It was like talking to a highly intelligent drunken ghost. She talked a lot about Charles and Emma and how it gave them both such pain that his ideas were leading him away from belief, and I thought, ‘My God, I’d like to write that story someday.’ “

Last spring the Natural History Museum in London asked Ms. Padel to write a few poems about her grandfather for a Darwin exhibition, and a few weeks later the Festival of Ideas in Bristol invited her to try a few more. To publish a whole book of them, which was her editor’s idea, she had to finish by August, so copies could be ready by Darwin’s bicentennial this past February.

That Darwin’s notebooks and correspondence are now available online made the task much easier, Ms. Padel said, and so did a coincidental stint as writer in residence at Somerset House, a London palace that is now an arts center but once housed government offices. Her great-great-grandfather worked there in 1838 and 1839 as secretary to the Geological Society.

“This was really the key moment in his life, when he was writing the thoughts that would become the theory of natural selection,” Ms. Padel said. “His mind was so busy he called it mental rioting, and being there I strenuously identified with that part of his life, that habit of passionate thinking.”

She also came to identify with her great-great-grandmother. “There is something of Emma in my grandmother and my mother, and maybe even in me,” she explained. “She was untidy, hated pretense and humbug, and was very acute. She can come across as quite acerbic.”

A poem about Darwin peeking at the sexy painting was one of the few things she made up, Ms. Padel said. “I invented that because it’s what’s missing. He certainly had an eye for the ladies and flirted with them. I think he probably had that Victorian, middle-class gentleman’s morality that sublimates sexuality into art or into nature.”

The marriage of Charles and Emma, she added, was “wonderful, passionate, affectionate, and it sustained itself across this great gulf of belief and unbelief.”

The biggest crisis in the marriage came in 1851, with the death of Anne, their second child and eldest daughter, Ms. Padel went on. “Darwin saw the bleakness of his ideas acting in his own family,” she explained. “The survival of the fittest.”

She added that though scarlet fever is not genetically transmitted, Darwin always felt that Annie had somehow inherited her illness because he had married his first cousin. “He carried that burden with him.” Or, as Ms. Padel writes, contrasting Darwin with his wife:

He does believe in a Divine Creator still

but not hers, not wise and kind. A ruthless shadowy thing

eternally going in for cruelty, elimination, waste.

On the other hand, it would probably encourage Darwin, who took a copy of “Paradise Lost” with him on the Beagle, to learn that one of his progeny had been nominated to be the Oxford Professor of Poetry, the profession’s second-best job in Britain (after the laureate).

The post is not filled according to the principles of natural selection. It’s elective, according to some old-fashioned rules, and invariably leads to factions and occasionally to electioneering. Ms. Padel tried to make light of the whole process, but did admit that since in the entire history of the poetry professorship a woman has never held the chair, her being in the running this time is probably proof of evolution.

Unravelling Nature’s tangles

In a free-wheeling chat, award-winning poet and scholar Ruth Padel talks to MEENA MENON about how her great great grandfather Charles Darwin influenced her outlook, her concern for tigers, her love for India and her first novel.

At 64, fame and age sit lightly on Ruth Padel, elected first woman Professor of Poetry at Oxford University in May 2009, a post from which she resigned later. Charles Darwin’s great great granddaughter was in Mumbai recently at the invitation of Phiroza Godrej, the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) and the PEN All India Centre to read from her first novel Where the Serpent Lives. In an interview, Padel, a Greek tragedy scholar, award-winning poet, musician and excavator, talks about her love for India, Darwin and the relationship between humans and other animals.

Inter-related

In her talk at the BNHS, she went back to Darwin and his use of the word “tangle” to explain the inter-relatedness of life. It is this tangle that she develops in her new novel set in the dense forests of India, London and Devon. “I wanted to launch the book particularly in India because the book is on India. I have already published Tigers in Red Weather, in 2005 in which I went all over Asia and all over the jungles that had tigers as their habitat… the Sunderbans, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sumatra, Russia and China but, of course, India was the centre and I came back to it at the end. Many wonderful Indian biologists taught me — Dr. Ullas Karanth in Karnataka, Valmik Thapar — and I realised that, perhaps, in writing fiction I could reach more people. I think the most essential thing that I am writing about whether in poetry or prose is the relationship between humans and the wild and, when I wrote a book of poems on my great great grandfather Charles Darwin, I realised that his inspiration came from the relation between humans and the rest of nature. This is very different from when I was in China in 2003 for the tigers. I was very shocked because writers there admired Darwin very much, and say he is the symbol of human progress, but I think that is not the right way to think of Darwin, I think of Darwin as somebody who put us in natural relation with the other animals and that is the central message that we should take from him,” she starts off.

What are her reasons for turning to fiction after many works in prose and poetry? Padel says, “I have written a lot of other prose books, but we are story shaped animals, aren’t we? That’s one difference between us and other animals. We think in terms of stories so I think in terms of stories too and I wanted to write a novel as well.”

Her grandmother, Darwin’s granddaughter, was very important to her. She would show Ruth, like her mother did, the garden, flowers in the garden, their names, how they were classified. “You try and imagine why something is happening. I think it is about understanding Nature as well as loving it. Now at a time when species are going extinct every day, there is all the more reason that people in cities should try and understand Nature. Yesterday we had terrible news that an activist in Gujarat Amit Jethwa was killed outside the Gujarat High Court. He was the one who drew attention to the mysterious, sinister and criminal death of lions in the Gir sanctuary. It shows us what a huge battle it is to protect the wild,” she points out.

She is frank that the desire for tigers in China is driving the loss of tigers in India. She is equally critical about tiger farming. The trouble with tiger farming is that, apart from the animal welfare aspect — that tigers are grown in order to be killed for their parts — once the tiger part is in the shop you can’t tell if it’s from the wild, poached from Ranthambore or farmed in China.

Admitting there is a lot of despair about the future of wildlife, she holds out hope. “Recently I saw a very good film “The truth about tigers”. This is not my country, so I don’t want to be prescriptive but from what I gather from my Indian wildlife friends, if there could be a special wildlife preservation set up, which was just to protect wildlife, things could be better. The goodwill is there, India has brilliant laws, has brilliant and wonderful scientists and conservationists. What it needs is implementation. Finally it is an issue of political will to restructure things for the protection of animals.”

People versus animals

On the people versus animals question, she is clear. “A lot of people say that India is the largest democracy in the world. It has lots and lots of problems and animals, I think, are the least of its worries. But if India cannot solve the problems on 98 per cent of its land that it has given humans, how will taking away that last two per cent on which the animals live, help solve the problem? In fact it will make it worse.”

“I went to see one settlement in Karnataka where wildlife protection people and conservators worked with people in villages who wanted to move out of the forest. I talked to two old men, both waiting for their grandchildren to come home from school by the bus. I asked them what it would be like if they were waiting in the forest. They said the children would have had to walk six miles through snakes and elephants. ‘We could not see each other because we would have to cross a river to see each other.’ I asked what’s good about living in the new place. They said they had power. In one sense it meant electricity but, in another sense, it meant power over their lives. Every road means one more killing in the forest.”

She also admits that, in 1972, when Project Tiger was set up many villages were moved out by force and that had wrong consequences. But now it needs to be done with good will and help from villagers and their input. That’s the only way the animals will be preserved.

She is not sure about her next novel yet but she knows she will come back here once again.

June, 1998

My new book, Rembrandt Would Have Loved You, solved something for me about subject and form: the way they are together. I don’t expect it’s got solved for ever. But some things seemed to work that hadn’t before.

I didn’t start out as poet; or maybe I did but it went underground. For twenty years, most of my energy went into researching and writing a lunaticly large-scale book, whose first chapters eventually became two books about ancient Greek tragedy, religion, science and the mind (In and Out of the Mind and Whom Gods Destroy, both Princeton University Press paperbacks). This meant years of research into anthropology, psychology, and history of thought. Checking out someone else’s mental world pluges you into workign out some historically balanced view on where your own came from. I thought a lot about the relation of love and baffled tact between what you study and what you are, and was pleased the reviews picked up on this, in phrases like “making new connexions”, “portraying an alien mental world”, “making vivid foreign patterns of thought”. I lived by teaching Greek and lecturing in universities here, mainly Oxford; or teaching English in Greece. I didn’t apply for a job or think about careers: I just had to finish that work.

It was mad. But I suppose all that connexion-making and investigating foreignness was my particular run-up to poems. All that time, poems came only at odd moments. I’d written poems at school and learnt poets I studied by heart, especially Tennyson, Keats, Donne, Hopkins, T.S. Eliot. I discoveed Auden, Yeats and Pound for myself. I didn’t “do” English at college: every new poet was a major accidental discovery for me and I’d carry the work round with me wherever I happened to be. Plath, Bishop, Basil Bunting, Macneice, Geoffrey Hill. But I never sent poems anywhere and read new work very eclectically. Universities asked me for articles and lectures, and the energy to read new and think new went into that.

I was living a lot in Greece, off and on, and the poetry I took with me there was often Elizabethan – Shakespeare, Wyatt, Raleigh. There was also Greek poetry, Seferis, Cavafy, Ritsos; plus the ancient stuff I worked on. And Latin, especially Ovid and Virgil, when Oxford twisted my arm to teach it. My world then was a funny to-and-fro between Anglo-American academe and backwater Greece. I spent time with friends in Crete and Athens, but also travelled a lot alone, taking work with me through landscapes full of history but isolated and humanly inconsequential now. In the Seventies I knew Greek pop songs better than anything here. In the early Eighties I did try for a couple of years to be a professional academic, at Birkbeck College. I thought evening teaching would leave time to write but it didn’t: you had to do all that admin and preparation in the day. My first pamphlet of poems Alibi (published by John Welch at the Many Press, to whom I’ll always be grateful), came out the year I left Birkbeck. “Alibi” means “somewhere else”: and that was where I always was, place and work.

Aegean landscape, plus the anthropological compulsion to make the alien familiar and draw attention to the accidental, historical strangeness of our own ways of seeing, went into my first collection, Summer Snow. A lot of it was fired by Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns, but the poems had little forward-moving music. My head was too full of other language somehow. I’d always done music. My father comes from a Central European tradition of music-making, there’ve always been professional musicians in the family. He taught us stringed instruments and chamber music. I found how crucial singing was to me, myself: as one poem in Rembrandt describes (“Will Ye No Come Back Again?”). I’d always learned songs by heart, always sang in choirs or informally with people everywhere I’d lived, especially in Paris (where I lived for a year on a scholarhiop, doing research) and in Greece, where I learnt a lot of songs and sang in the Heraklion Town Choir. We did the first Cretan performance of Handel’s Messiah in Greek. In Oxford and Cambridge I was very lucky to be in choirs that did wonderful a cappella sixteenth and twentieth-century stuff.

In Summer Snow there were lots of things I hadn’t joined up, above all music and poetry. But some personas there reappear in the next two books. Herodotus the traveller, remembering home in a foreign place, gave the background story to a sinister poem in Angel called “What We Did”. A European doctor caught in the Turkish siege of Rhodes came back in Fusewire as a Muslim doctor in the siege of Sarajevo. And the colonization theme was there from the start. A poem about Cyprus and its betrayal by Britain must have prepared the ground for the whole theme of Fusewire as well as many poems in Angel (say, “Indian Red”, “Trial”, “Rosa Silvestris Russica” and the Gulf War poems. Angel was a very battle-oriented book.) In Summer Snow, the colonization was mainly Balkan. In later books it moved closer to home.

I didn’t know then that foreignness, which I dealt with all the time in my prose work, brings with it questions of power and its abuse. “It is a hard responsibility to be a stranger”, says John Hewitt in a poem set in Greece. One of my brothers, an anthropologist, did his Masters degree in Delhi, whose anthropologists have a perspective very different from that of post-colonial Britain on who you study and why: on the power relations behind any anthropological enterprise. Which I think includes poems. Poets plunder other people’s lives: it’s one of the worries driving Heaney’s Station Island. You acquire unfair power over people by putting them in a poem. You have to be very careful.

A bit of this got fought out in Angel, whose background landscape is Thatcher’s increasingly alienating late 80s Britain. Reviews brought out the anthropological strangeness, saying it “explored the rub between two cultures or people: where imbalance of power leads to a corruption of relationship in which one voice persistently drowns out another.” I wrote Angel as I was writing Whom Gods Destroy, about madness in different cultures. Angel’s mad voices spotlight the inhumanity of Thatcher’s Britain as it hit me. Reviews also identified a “disturbed surreal” tone: the book “described an absurd nightmare-country, where things in equal parts ludicrous and terrible occur, then made you recognize contemporary England.” Now I look back, Angel was trying to find my way of making the familiar strange. People started using the phrase magic realism about the work.

I’d been very lucky to be invited by Matthew Sweeney to join his workshop, which he took over from the Irish poet Robert Greacen, and ran at his home and local pub. Matthew also asked me sometimes to teach with him. I learned so much from Matthew about listening truthfully to strangeness, and from his ruthless way of making words justify their place in a poem. He’ll frisk a poem with a 600mm scalpel for laziness of language or thought. Matthew kindly agreed to be an external editor for Fusewire and Rembrandt, and I’m always grateful for his criticism. He has an infallible infra red radar for the weak spot in a poem. In his group I met Mike Donaghy, Sarah Maguire, Don Paterson, Vicki Feaver, Lavinia Greenlaw and Jo Shapcott and other poets bringing out their first books. Their work and criticism, all very different, exploratory and original, was utterly exciting. I find their work, and that of other poets who started publishing the same time like Ian Duhig, and younger poets, some of the most exciting: because (I think) I identify with what they’re all trying, in their individual ways, to solve. And admire and learn from what they come up with.

I went to Ireland because it was where poetry came from. I now had a child and couldn’t get to Greece so much. Fusewire focussed my colonization/power-struggle subject (which I still wasn’t really aware of) into Ireland, found a way of eroticizing history, moved everything closer to home and somehow raised the stakes of what I wrote about. As in Angel’s “Tudor Garden, Southampton”, I was now writing about being child of an abusive colonizing power; about being held responsible for colonialism. The history of the victor isn’t easy to identify with. Irish and Scots poets can write about history – famine roads, clearances – with anger not guilt. What about descendants of the power that did all that abusing and invading? I read Roy Foster’s history of Ireland, and a book about the history and siege of Derry. (Another siege. There must be something about the image of the city, standing for human risk, that’s important to me). One Northern Irish journalist has called Derry “Stroke City” (as in Derry/Londonderry). The poem that came out of that is one of the weakest in the book, but was important for me because it blended the book’s two themes, the personal and the historical, sex and war.

Being asked, increasingly, to write and lecture on feminist issues in my academic hat, I was lucky to work out feminist things for myself first in that environment, not while worrying about being a woman poet – the sort of thing Eavann Boland explores in Object Lessons. I was in another country. For me, feminist consciousness evolved in a context of study, of history, classics, opera studies, among some very inspiring and generous women in universities (especially America), who were absolutely sure of their worth and what they were writing. Gender studies was a growing subject; their own institutions were promoting women. In both Oxford and Cambridge, most Professors of English are women at present. After being a research Fellow in various Oxford colleges, where I was the only woman (one college had to change its sixteenth-century statutes for me) I had met some nasty patches of velvet glove misogyny, but mainly ignored it – I just found it unteresting, and learned to recognize and despise men clutching the external tokens of power.

I think I was lucky to do this in an academic context (or in Crete) rather than poetry: in both, the only power that’s interesting is power that came from someone’s work. Power that isn’t earned by the work, that comes from someone’s command of PR or their position, isn’t real. I didn’t have to bother with kneejerk chauvinism in male-dominated institutions. Feminist issues came alive for me first in work; then in life. But when Jo Shapcott and I went to a lecture Eavann gave recently, and Eavann asked if it was still true in Britain that most poetry editors are men, we had to say it was. The three of us asked Michael Schmidt, Eavann’s editor: who was reviewing Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters for P.N. Review? We betted it was a man. (The male reviewing of that book has been extraordinary – a sort of boys’ club saying “these poems prove feminism is wrong” – or even, “Since, as we all know, feminism is a Bad Thing, these poems must be good”). Michael looked sweetly sheepish and said he couldn’t remember.

You meet instinctive male conservation of power much more in the poetry than the academic world. A lot of male poets who started publshing in the Seventies or early Eighties still can’t really hear women’s work. Sean O’Brien’s recent book The Deregulated Muse is a fine landscape of recent British poetry, but – as he knows – it is in a way very autobiographical, adn has the strength and gaps that come from that. It’s what excites him, what he’s learnt from. He’s a wonderful critic, he always comes up with a completely fresh and important angle on particular voices and style. But the imbalance of men’s and women’s work in that book is – let’s say, unrepresentative of the important work that’s been done.

By the time I wrote Rembrandt, I was living by reviewing and journalism, much more in this country than out of it. Rembrandt cares less about power-conflict. There’s sexual politics in it, a confrontation of self and other; but things are more equal. No poems about sieges for a start. It’s more to do with tenderness, with being together rather than opposed. “Waterloo Bridge” decides that despite the attandant sadnesses, it’s a good thing, whatever “city” is. Its tensions are constructive, not antagonistic. As with the relation of subject and form in these poems (I hope), personal tensions and misunderstandings work with rather than against joy. They become part of each other.

Rembrandt was a sort of breaking of form. After Fusewire, in that awful gap after finishing a book, I felt imprisoned in three-liner poems. Did I “naturally” think in that shape? Claustrophobia city. Matthew said, “You’re hung up on it. Try something completely different.” So I did the most unnatural-feeling things I could, capital letters at the beginning of lines, indentation, complex internal rhymes. It was great. I began to find my mind racing into formal patterns and relations ahead of me. One poem (“Don’t Fence Me In”) ends on the sound “go”. It wasn’t till I finished the first OK draft that I realized the poem had, on its own, prepared for that sound in every stanza all the way through – except one which pulled the “o”-sound into “Joseph”. It was amazingly freeing. I found I could get all sorts of things into a poem that I hadn’t before, especially teasing and humour. I found I could go over the top on the massed imagery that’s always been one of my vices; and laugh at my own language from inside the poem. The poems became freer to think, when I cracked a new formal whip at them. There was room for more longer poems. All my books have one long one; Rembrandt has several. Mixing disparate things like humour and baroque imagery gives you space, somehow. to have fun varying tones and tensions. This brought back the “magic realist” side of things, which Carol Rumens picked up on in her review.

I think it’s got something to do with the way my particular obsessions click on metaphor and image. In Colm Toibin’s preface to his collection of essays on Paul Durcan, The Kilfenora Tea-Boy, he describes how Durcan stopped using “like”. (“Paul, would you ever stop saying things are like things? They either are or they’re not”.) Metaphor is a way of connecting home and foreign. I know it’s what I think with first. If it’s so damn important to me it ought to be real. It’s more risky and alive to stand behind what you’re saying, as Durcan always does, if you drop the “like”.

The prose book I’m writing now is about women’s lovesong[ in fact, this got transmuted to men's rock music in "I'm A Man"], and that’s everywhere in Rembrandt. Listening to people like P. J. Harvey, Tori Amos, Liz Phair, Michelle Shocked, Laurie Anderson, and see how they go at things, has been a revelation. They have the same problems women poets have, in a more violent form: the bulk of what’s gone before has been made by the boys. You value the work, but have to find yourself in reacting to it.

Most voices that influenced me early on were inevitably Their words in me gave a particular take on women-in-a-poem. I used to think this didn’t matter. Now I think that’s where you start: from your awareness that men’s creativity got there first. Before you sing out, you have know, in technicolour and 3D, exactly what that’s done to you. How male art made you see yourself.

Luckily there are now, increasingly, more lyric voices with a black laugh and strength in them, like Plath, Bishop and Carol Ann Duffy, who have led some ways. In Rembrandt I found I was writing love poems – a way of looking at a man which is I hope as strong as, but different (maybe more teasing) from male poems’ traditional ways of looking at women – in which love and sex became a new springboard for me. Into describing the world as a mix of ordinary-life objects, things you see in the street, the home and the media (CDs, faxes, Esquire, Jeye-cloths, Safeways, Guardian journalists, Spice Girls, Barclays Bank, the computer Deep Blue) and other things which were always important to me because I’d spent so much of my life doing all that often irrelevant-seeming research, but hadn’t found a live way of bringing in before. History (the French resistance, Cathars, Malory); science (the speed of light, the Periodic Table); ancient myth (Pan, Echo, the Mahabharata); ecology (doomed tigers and dolphins). Plus art. Rembrandt and his use of shadow. Peter Rabbit, Chrétien de Troyes, St Augustine, The Horse Whisperer. Billie Holiday, Mary Black, folk songs, Stravinsky, Bach. There’s also the weird way love makes you think about death. Loving someone, you don’t want them ever to stop being.

Death and dying are around me in a lot of places just now. The last three poems in the book are about that. Rembrandt solved (probably only for a while, I imagine) an unease I had about exoticism – that it can be too easily bought. What I wrote about in Summer Snow looked over here like exoticism, but it was actually more familiar to me than anything here. Because of how I’d lived, I was at home elsewhere. In Fusewire, two countries and people misunderstand each other across a sea of history. Going out from your own culture or self (or a sentence), into faraway places (or far-out imagery), seems to me a creative way of tackling central home things. In Durcan’s Going Home to Russia, Russia is metaphor for Ireland, like Argentina in Toibin’s novel Story of the Night. In Muldoon’s poem about mum washing his hair, “Brazil” stands for the mystery of sex faced by a kid. Elizabeth Bishop got there first, in her brilliant Crusoe poems. For me, poetry’s about going completely out there, into other places and people: a sort of muddle of imagination, generosity and risk. Creativity, like love, comes from being and staying at risk. I don’t see the point of playing safe, in a poem or anywhere else. You’ve got to risk losing what’s yours, what is you, by going out into the other: the lover, the other country with other maybe savagely different values. The worthwhile thing is making the connexion. What you find there, what you do with other people: that’s where the music is.

By Christina Patterson, The Independent, 30th July 2004

” You mustn’t complain if the dog bites you,” Ruth Padel says as she spears an olive. “It’s one of the rules of this club. But,” she adds thoughtfully, “it doesn’t bite women; only men.”

We both titter nastily, but later I have cause to be grateful. Leaping up for more drinks in this members’ club in Soho, I manage to tread on the golden lurcher, which has, it seems, been lurking beneath my chair. He growls, but I am saved by my sex.

Padel is not afraid of dogs. She is not afraid of much. The woman once described as “the sexiest voice in British poetry” has recently been travelling around the world to see tigers. She has sung in a nightclub in Istanbul, taught horse riding to the wives of British officers in Berlin and lived with peasants in Crete. Her new poetry collection, The Soho Leopard draws on travels in Siberia and Burma, Louisiana and China, with a panoply of wildlife – tigers, leopards, alligators and jaguars – that also includes the lounge lizard.

Padel started writing poetry when she was three, but she was 43 before she realised that poetry “was going to be the thing”. In the intervening years, she had a career in academia, lecturing in ancient and modern Greek at both Oxford and Cambridge. The word “career” is, in fact, one that triggers a severe allergic reaction. “I didn’t want to be tenured in,” Padel explains, “so I had lectureships and research fellowships. I was”, she adds, “the first woman fellow of Wadham College, Oxford. They had to change the statutes for me.” In poetry, too, Padel is adamant that “career” is anathema to the process and the vocation.

It was passion that led her through her PhD, a passionate interest in the connections between the mind and the soul in the Greek tragic works that dominated her life for seven years. It was passion that led her to Crete, where she joined an archaeological dig and learnt Greek. And it was passion, of course, that led her to the sculptor she lived with for seven years. “He taught me a lot about the creative life,” she confides.

A poem, she says, “starts with an image or a word or a line. It gets hooked on to some other things and then it grows. There are two ways of making sculpture. The first is where you have some wax and you work it up and bring some things in. The second,” she adds, taking a sip of her red wine, “is Michelangelo chipping away at the stone and finding the image inside.”

Padel’s poetry is a fiercely idiosyncratic mix of erudition and the contemporary vernacular, bringing together references to Pushkin and Darth Vader, Malory and Iggy Pop, Odysseus and Issey Miyake. History features prominently. So do music, visual arts, restaurants and clothes – any and every aspect, in fact, of culture past and present. “I think I’m always trying, like a magpie,” she confides, “to bring different things in and see how much a poem can bear.”

Her first full-length collection, Summer Snow, published nearly 15 years ago, is the one that most explicitly draws on her knowledge of ancient Greek history. It is, she says disarmingly, “not very good”. In her second collection, Angel, she continues to combine mythic and historical perspectives, but adds a babble of voices from Bedlam to raise questions about madness and meaning. In her third collection, Fusewire, she uses a love affair as a metaphor for the colonial relationship between Britain and Ireland. “If Wallace Stevens and Anna Akhmatova were one and the same person,” the Irish poet Paul Durcan said on reading it, “you’d have Ruth Padel.”

It was in her fourth collection, Rembrandt Would Have Loved You, that she discovered the theme, and form, that set her free. The book begins with a poem called “Icicles Round a Tree in Dumfriesshire”, which won the National Poetry Competition in 1996. Ostensibly about an ice sculpture by Andy Goldsworthy, it’s archetypal Padel, combining references to art, Aretha Franklin, log fires and lightning in a love poem that’s also a plea: “I hope you’ll be truthful/ To me. At least as truthful as lightning,/ Skinning a tree.”

Formally, it was a departure and set the tone for much that would follow. “I was stuck,” she confesses, “and couldn’t get away from these three-liners. So I decided to try something different. I did things that felt terribly alien – it was like putting a poem in a dinner jacket or an evening suit or something. I suddenly began to find interesting ways of stopping a line, which I think was going back to the patternings of the Greek lyric.”

Rembrandt Would Have Loved You is the first of three collections charting the progress of a turbulent love affair, beginning with explosive passion and ending, in The Soho Leopard, with disillusion. Padel is engagingly open about the fact that her poems draw heavily on personal experience. “All poets use their personal experience in a different sort of way,” she declares matter-of-factly. “Some disguise it a lot. Some don’t. Actually,” she adds, “once I’ve made a poem out of it, it doesn’t seem an embarrassing or intimate thing at all. After a while, I think of them as artefacts.”

If love is a theme, it is also a metaphor and the jumping-off point for a whole raft of intellectual challenges. Rembrandt Would Have Loved You is about love and art, light and dark, but it also subverts the whole trope of the love poem and the traditional male gaze. While writing the poems, Padel was writing a prose book, I’m a Man, a study of rock music and masculinity. It started off as an exploration of women and rock, but, after meeting Yoko Ono, Shirley Manson of Garbage, and Gayle Advert (bass-guitarist in the punk band The Adverts, who told Ruth wistfully that “it was just nice if they didn’t spit all over you”), she realised that she needed to go back to basics – ie, men.

In her fifth collection, Voodoo Shop, Padel takes the reader on a whirlwind journey: from the local deli to Bondi Beach, Venice to Galway, Rio de Janeiro to Cannes. While the poems work as dramatic monologues in their own right, they are also metaphors for the human search for faith and truth, in art, religion and, yes, even voodoo dolls. And there’s the jungle theme, too, the literal and metaphorical landscape that has come to dominate Padel’s life for the past three years.

Padel is a great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin. Her favourite book as a child was The Jungle Book. It is only recently, however, that her interest in wildlife has become something of an obsession. Looking back now, she can see that there were glimmerings of it all along. There are snakes, hummingbirds and tigers as far back as Angel. “I think,” she admits, with a rueful smile, “I must have been dreaming about tigers all my life.”

She is certainly dreaming about them now. The writing of The Soho Leopard coincided with her research for a travel memoir, provisionally entitled Tigers in Red Weather.The book, “an inner and an outer memoir”, due for publication next year, involved tiger-watching visits to Siberia, China and Burma, which fed into the poems as well as the prose.

The opening poem, “Tiger Drinking at a Forest Pool”, came to her on a journey to Vladivostock. “I woke up in the half-light of Vladivostock,” she recalls, “remembering George Herbert’s poem ‘Prayer’, made entirely of things for which it is the title. I thought, ‘Maybe I could do it like that.’” The result, which she had written by the end of the day, while visiting a n “antler-velvet farm” of deer which a tiger had been plundering, is a touching lyric of love and loss, a lament for “treasure found but lost”; for “anyone hurt by littleness”, and “treachery forgiven”.

As always in Padel’s work, the poems work as individual, often dazzling, snapshots and together as an extended metaphor. Although love is still there, largely in the sour taste of its absence, it is no longer the main theme. That is no less than our human need for wildness and for stories – and the wider moral implications of the stories we tell. In poems such as “The Forest, the Corrupt Official and a Bowl of Penis Soup” and the title poem, “The Soho Leopard”, she charts a journey of moral disenchantment. “There’s always,” she says, spearing another olive, “the fight between rhetoric and nature. But at the end,” she adds, “there’s a feeling that two people don’t matter a hill of beans – the things I’ve learnt are so shaky, so large.”

Padel is getting used to meeting tigers. “Tiger eyes are very small,” she tells me, as I manoeuvre my way back round the tripped-over dog. “They’re not green; they’re a kind of amber-topaz – small and brown, with a sort of khaki iris. What’s really lethal is the tiger’s front foot. What does the danger,” she concludes with a dazzling smile, “is the claws.”

From The “Quote –UnQuote” Newsletter, vol. 14. No. 1 January 2005

By Nigel Rees

“FAR AWAY IS CLOSE AT HAND IN IMAGES OF ELSEWHERE”

For a number of years in the seventies, train passengers going in and out of Paddington Station in London were beguiled or puzzled by words painted up at the side of the track: “Far away is close at hand in images of elsewhere”. This elegant graffito because almost famous – not least on 22nd June 1978, when Michael Wharton, the “Peter Smple” humorous columnist on The Daily Telegraph, diccussed the work of the unknown artist as if he were an Old Master.

“Dr Anita Maclean-Gropius’s monumental catalogue raisonné, “The Master of Paddintgon” (Viper and Bugloss £65), published last year, dealt in detail with all the works confidently or tentatively attributed to the Master and his School. It was, of course, savaged in a long review by Dr. J.S. Hate, Keeper of Graffiti at the Victoria and Slbert Museum, in the British Joural of Graffitology….“

I myself also mentioned the piece in my first collection, Graffiti Lives, OK (1979), and got round to photographing it in May 1981 just as builders were demolishing the wall on which it was painted. It was pointed out to me that the first six words had apparently been taken from the Robert Graves poem, “Song of Contrariety” (1923):

Far away is close at hand
Close joined is far away,
Love shall come at your command
Yet will not stay.

I mentioned some of this on a recent edition o the radio show, and was than intrigued to be contacted by “Helen” who claimed that the “Master of Paddington” was, in fact, two people, her husband Dave and his brother Geoff. They painted it, she said, “one Christmas Eve (when there were no trains) in probably 1974 or thereabouts”. It was placed to be visible on the Oxford line, as both Dave and Helen were Oxford graduates.

Helen confirmed the Graves allusion in the first six words but fascinatingly suggested that the last four were written by the poet Ruth Padel, who, as it happened, had been at Oxford with Dave and Helen.

What was it? I contacted Ruth Padel and asked for her assistance. At first she could only think that £”elsewhere was a very important word for her. The first poet whose work she learned a lot of when young was Tennyson, for whom also the words “far, far away” always had, he said, a strange resonance. Her own very first publication, she said, was a pamphlet of poems called Alibi (1985): and alibi, of course, means “elsewhere” in Latin.

But then light dawned. Ruth remembered something she had published much earlier as a classics graduate student: a scholarly article entitled “Imagery of the Elsewhere: Two Choral Odes of Euripides”, in Classical Quarterly December 1974.

“Yes,” said Dave, “that was it. I don’t think I ever read the article, but it was a great title. It was lying on our kitchen table while Geoff and I were discussing what were were going to write on the wall.”

“Mmm,” said Ruth. “The CQ gave me loads of offprints, I can remember the Courier print: my name, and Euripides’s, on this pale blue cover – my first publication! I didn’t know what to do with them all. So I gave one to Dave.”

Dave read classics at University College while Ruth did the same at Lady Margaret Hall, in the same year as Helen, reading medicine. Then Dave went on to do a B. Phil. in philosophy as Ruth was doing her PhD in Greek.

In February 2005, in Ruth’s kitchen this time, Nigel Rees reunited Helen, Dave and Geoff with Ruth Padel. It turned out that the resonance of that graffito, and the “imagery of elsewhere”, had got everywhere. When Geoff’s son went to college he shared rooms with a girl called Shovel whose father always wrote on the back of envelopes to the letters he sent her, these same words: “Far away is close at hand in images of elsewhere.”

“He always puts that,” she said. “I don’t know why.”
And in 1992, in their song “Godspeed,” even Catatonia quoted the words in a refrain, “Paradise is close at hand in images of elsewhere….”
Read Valerie Grove’s account in the Times of this story and reunion reunion in the Times, Weekend section, April 16th 2005.

Margaret Graham interviewed Ruth Padel while she was visiting Skopje in September 2004. Her interview was tranbslated into Macedonian and published in the magazine Kulturen Zivot in February 2005.

“It’s an important moment for me, this,”said Ruth Padel, “because my daughter has just left home and gone to Paraguay, I’m just finishing my prose book on tigers and I don’t know what I’m going to write next. So it seemed a good moment to come here, and tie up some things that have been important to me all my life.”

This is how Ruth Padel explained her visit to Macedonia in September of this year. She had been invited to the Struga Poetry Evenings, which coincided with her daughter leaving home, and though she could nto attend them then, this revived memories of Skopje from her last visit, some thirty years ago.

“My imagination and my emotions were very taken with Skopje, with Macedonia, and with your circle of friends and the interest in music that I found here in 1971, even though then I didn’t know I was a poet. I was doing a Ph.D. on Ancient Greek at Oxford and I didn’t know anything about modern Greece!

But I’d already met you and I wanted to come down through Macedonia, and do it on a train, so I met you and had the most wonderful evening. I met all your gorgeous friends and there was lots of singing, and I just thought these are the most wonderful people, I want to stay here for ever; but I had to go on to the British School in Athens.”

Padel wrote her first poem when she was three, but she was 43 before she realised that poetry “was going to be the thing”. In the intervening years she lectured in ancient and modern Greek at Oxford and Cambridge universities and at Birkbeck College, London University, but always as a visiting lecturer or a research fellow. The idea of a ‘career’ – in academia or in poetry – is, she says, anathema to the process and the vocation.

Her latest venture is her book on wild tigers, to be published in the spring. I ask her how it came about. “On the winter equinox of 2000 I ended a relationship that had been very important to me. It was a dark moment, and what I discovered at that point was that the only thing I was interested in was reading and writing about wild tigers. This is one of the things, one of the quirks, that happen in the unconscious. The tiger was the vehicle that took me out of that dark place.”

The book is a memoir of travels in Siberia, Burma, India, Laos, Bhutan and China. As she says, “It’s a double journey: into falling out of love (reassessing something that had been going on for five years), nbuit also finding out about tigers. And of course the larger things, the animals, the environment, are much more important than the smaller one. As in the ending of Casablanca: compared to the larger thing, two little people don’t amount to a hill of beans.”

Her latest volume of poetry, The Soho Leopard, also reflects this journey. “Some poems in it which are about recovering from a relationship. They are also about animals, because I realised I had always cared about them… There were animals all over my earlier poems and I didn’t really realise that, it was just so natural to me. I think I must have been dreaming about tigers all my life.”

Asked how important it is that she is a descendent of Darwin’s, she says she is glad of the association now because it helps to publicise the ecological message in her book where, among other things, she argues that the health of the tiger, the largest predator, is an indicator of the health of a whole ecological system. But beyond this, all her family have been scientists, she says, so accuracy and attention to detailed observation was dinned into her in childhood. They regarded her decision to concentrate on poetry as extremely odd, but after being dragged to her first poetry reading her mother eventually admitted: “I see the point of poets now. They notice things.”

Poets have always held up mirrors to the world. “A modern culture needs modern poems to reflect its changing self to itself, through the tried tools of an ancient art but also through the evolving sound of its own words,” writes Padel in the introduction to her book 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem. Travelling through Britain to give poetry readings, she felt the scale of real public interest in poetry was not reflected in the British media. “People who live outside poetry hotspots but who want to find out what poetry can offer may not know where to start. Poetry’s very richness and variety, the number of books of poems in the bookshops, are a barrier. Faced with a heap of books, all carrying puffs on the back saying how great they are, how can you know which one is worth anything to you?” She proposed the idea of writing a weekly column in the Independent on Sunday, printing a modern poem and adding her own way of reading it. No other paper had a column like it: it was a challenge to senior editorial colleagues, who were not exactly poetry lovers.

” It’s against current newspaper philosophy – they believe that the readers want more sex and more sport, but this is very unfair to the readers. My column actually got more letters every day from readers than they’d ever had for any single thing. They were amazed. Some of the people at the paper actually suggested I’d written them myself! They were wonderful letters, and they came from all over the place, not just Britain, and the writers really cared about the poems. The column was poem-led because the point was the poem, not the poet. In Britain you get lots of books of poetry, but potential readers are so disconnected from the poetry scene that they really don’t know who’s good and who’s not. So the idea was for them to taste, so that they could see if they liked this or they liked that.”

52 Ways of Reading a Poem is a selection of these weekly columns, with an introduction full of fascinating insights into the development of British poetry, its traditions, its innovations over the last forty years or so and the society which has produced it. The selection is of poems by alternately male and female authors – an amazing innovation itself in a craft which is traditionally male-dominated – and each poem is analysed as an insight into the complexities and concerns of life today; various levels of meaning are revealed through the way the language, the medium itself, is used to create and organise this meaning: pattern and sounds, syllable-length, line-length, rhyme or half-rhyme, and the play of imagery and reference. The craft of the poet, the “gritty technical stuff” which readers might not notice, is revealed.

Talking of the poet’s craft, Padel says: “A gush of sentiment has nothing to do with poetry. You;ve got to think of the the power of the poem, not the sentiment. Confessional poetry was fine, but Robert Lowell was a fantastic technician, he had lots of formal powers. When he started his confessional poetry he had amazing technical resources, formal resources, to draw on, which people who copy him don’t have.”

I ask her about her own poetry. A poem, she says, “starts with an image or a word or a line. It gets hooked onto some other things and then it grows.” We look at ‘Tiger Drinking at a Forest Pool’, the first poem in her latest volume, The Soho Leopard. She had been talking to an Indian friend who said that even in cities there people have an idea, an awareness, of tigers, even if they have never seen one. The associations are “water, moonlight, danger, dream”. She had this, eventually the first line, and the last was in her mind: “A painting on silk, that may fade”. These two lines stayed with her, then later: “I woke up in the half-light of Vladivostok,” she recalls, “remembering George Herbert’s poem ‘Prayer’, and I thought, ‘I could do that.’ I wouldn’t have to describe the tiger, I would just have a string of images for the tiger, and then if it was a sonnet it would need to be very sonorous, it would have to have all the same vowel sounds.” She spent the day driving to a deer-farm (antler fur is an ancient medicine, but the farm is “like a MacDonalds for the tigers”) and wrote the complete poem that day – which is unusual for her, she says

When we planned this article for Kulturen zivot, we asked Ognen Cemerski if he would make translations of some of the poems that Padel presented at the highly successful poetry reading she gave at the British Council during her stay.

This is her own selection, taken from The Soho Leopard. They are all shorter poems, with the concentrated craft, the breadth of reference and the glitter and precision of language which ranges across registers that readers have come to associate with her work.

These poems are a distillation of things noticed. They are like a photograph taken by flashlight, a brilliant illumination of a single moment which in fact includes the past and the present, the here and the there, the general and the particular. “I like to bring things together. You can talk about the glands under an alligator’s tongue at the same time as having a metaphor for something completely different,” she says. In the same way, she brings together a mixture of erudition, technical terms and the contemporary vernacular in her language. “I’m always trying, like a magpie, to bring different things in and see how much a poem can bear.” It is the craft of the poet that creates the relationship between all these. The theme of ‘how you make things’ – a ceramic vase, music, an embroidery, anything that is made by human hand, and why people make things – is one that runs through all her work.

In ‘Mary’s Elephant, Elizabeth’s Spinet’ the poet looks at two artefacts, an embroidery and a musical instrument, set side by side in the same room in the Victoria and Albert Museum and made by the cousins Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth 1st of England. Mary is in enforced isolation, imprisoned by her cousin, embroidering a distant animal she has never seen and including in the design her own personal emblem, the marigold turning towards the sun – the sun she will never again reach herself. She cannot communicate with Elizabeth, the letters in her mind are “unsendable as words for resin/In Armenian acrolect”. These words themselves are difficult to understand, the obscurity of the distant language in an alien alphabet and the technical linguistic term ‘acrolect’ reflecting the difficulty of communicating. But the demotic statement “It’s been said” sums up the situation: Elizabeth knows it all already.

Elizabeth’s spinet carries the falcon and the sceptre, the heraldic device belonging to her mother Anne Boleyn, “(Her mum’s. She paid extra for that)” the poet adds laconically; while the sound-hole is “eavesdropping”, a part of Elizabeth’s far-flung system of spies, whom she uses against all her enemies, including Mary, whom she will execute to hold on to the sceptre of power – the symbol borrowed from that mother who was herself executed by Elizabeth’s father. But against this background of bloody strife, the cousins have something in common. They both turn to art as a consolation. Elizabeth is also a lonely woman, ageing and grotesque, her melancholy caught in the image of the single dyed hair that falls on the keyboard.

Describing the two women, the poet is aware of the distances between them, suggested by “the black unbroken forest”, and the distance between us and them – the killing of the last wolf in Scotland “two hundred years down the line”, but still two hundred years before our time. Yet the embroidery and the spinet are now together in one room, and if we held hands across that room and touched them, we could join those two who never met, as they and we are joined in this poem about the role of art.

As well as the importance of art, in this volume Padel is concerned with the way it, like the tiger, is threatened today. The painter in ‘The Forest, the corrupt Official and a Bowl of Penis Soup’ cannot paint his traditional subjects: the forest, source of beauty and diversity, is being destroyed by the corrupt official, just as he is corrupting the two fifteen-year-old girls and has destroyed the tiger for the sake of a sex-enhancing soup. But the artist can still paint the desolation that is there, can act as witness. “The world may be full of political betrayal, but you can still go in there and make art out of it,” says Padel. “But you have to be sardonic about it,” she adds.

” The poor old tigers didn’t evolve to be adaptable,” she says. “They can’t maintain their being in a hostile world because this hostile creature, homo sapiens, has taken over the world.” On the other hand, the series of poems about wild foxes in London show how these smaller predators have learned to live with the threat of mankind, sharing his environment and using his products (‘Playtime’). “We should identify with this other animal,” she says, “we’re animals too. We belong with other animals and we need them. Macedonia has got the lynx, which is most rare and wonderful. I hope to God it keeps it.”

I ask if she will use her experience in Macedonia in her writing. “No,” she says, “my mind doesn’t work that way.” But she hopes to come to the Struga Poetry Festival one year. “I like being with people from other places from myself and listening to how they talk, and what they talk about, and their metaphors.”

Has she anything to say to people here? “Keep singing! Song is the most important vehicle of the human spirit and of the culture. Keep it. It’s a precious thing. Learn it, teach it to your children. Honour the folk tradition of song. It keeps your history.”

In a Mexican magazine, timed to coincide with Ruth Padel’s appearance in November 2004 at the Mexican literary festival, Letras in Golfo, Ruth Padel was interviewed by Vctor-Manuel Mendiola, Valerie Mejer and Mac Test.

When you constructed the poem on Onegin, did you overlap your biography with Tatiana’s life?

No, I took three English translations of the poem because I don’t know Russian. But I had vividly in my mind the scene in Tschaikovsky’s opera. I struggled with the translations but really got my sense of her from the opera.

Do you feel in anyway close to Ted Hughes’ poem Crow or Love Song?

Not all that close, wonderful though they are. I admire Crow very deeply, I love how he makes mythic and jagged what is happening to him. But he’s not a poet I have carried round with me and studied like Plath and Bishop, Louis MacNeice Geoffrey Hill, Basil Bunting. Nor one I consciously I learned by heart like Donne, Hopkins, Tennyson, Keats, Eliot, Yeats.

Have you ever been tempted to write a novel-poem?

No, I admired Les Murray’s recent one very much, but I think I can only handle novels and poems separately myself!

You lived for some years in Crete, singing in a choir and in a nightclub. This makes me think of Lorca and how singing was a big part of his life (and you certainly seem to have taken it farther than he did). How was this time of your life? How did singing and these songs influence your work?

Songs come in and out of poems,. Less so in Soho Leopard than Rembrandt Would Have Loved You (which I wrote when writing I’m A Man, about music), or Voodoo Shop.

I was not writing poems when living in Crete, I was writing up my Oxford PhD as a book, learning Crete; it was a wonderful time for me, I think everyone needs to live in another culture and language deeply. And songs were first base for me. I’ve always sung: English, Irish and Scottish folksongs too. Not to guitar, just to myself. I like the world of a song. The way it dramatizes and lyricizes a moment. I need songs; in any language.

“The Soho Leopard” has a quote from Charles Darwin: “You can understand the true conditions of life only if you use your imagination to hold on to a sense of the ruthlessness of the natural forces that could waste the bright surface.” I know that you’re a distant relation to him and in your book you certainly seem to be using your imagination to create (or understand) connections to the natural and unnatural world. Do you find that this ancestor of yours has a connection with you in his approach to the “matter” he studied?

Yes, since I was a student I’ve felt increasingly close to him, My grandmother was his grand daughter, she edited his autobiography, talked about him, and I have written a fair bit about him recently, and love his kind of mind, the speculation and honesty of his mind.

But he took the death of species for granted: you can’t understand the origin of species without extinction, But what he was not faced with is the whole sudden cascade of loss of many species, which we are seeing now.

In your book The Soho Leopard you seem to explore the issue of the survival of the strongest species and challenge the entire notion of “strength.” In a poem you write, “Eurydice, whose death was all her fault”. It’s all done with great sense of humour. Can you elaborate on this?

Ah. that poem, that line, is talking in the voice, and suddenly seeing through the eyes, of an Orpheus, who is blaming Eurydice for slipping away from him. I like humour. I like shifts in register, shifts in voice and tone.

The strongest species: mmm, I think there has been a lot of stuff about power in relationships, both political and personal, throughout my work. Fusewire was a series of poems about an English woman in relationship with an Irish man, and since England has always been the colonial power that abused Ireland (which was seen as female) that invested the historical power relationship and its gender.
It is ironic that tigers are the top predator and also the most vulnerable now.

The past two years you have been travelling though Asia writing about wild tigers. This kind of adventure was popular for writers at the end of the XIX century and surrounded their memory with a romantic aura. What led you to undertake this adventure?

I ended a long relationship, had to get out of London, happened to go to India near a tiger reserv. After that, I needed to write about them, wrote a couple of short stories about tigers, met tiger biologists, wanted to see more….The writing had to serve the tigers, rather than me using them. I wanted to write about the conservationists, the problems of tiger conservation. I hope my book will make more people aware of the issues surrounding their plight – like jaguars in Mexico here. In the end, it comes down to political will to save the animals and forests they live in. But public awareness helps.

Tigers ambushed me; they were about survival. I was brought up with nature magazines, the conservation magazine ORYX was in the lavatory, my mother subscribed to it. She is a biologist. and cares deeply about conservation.

Jorge Luis Borges, whom you often quote, made his first drawing of a tiger when he was four (I saw it in an exhibition, it is filled with orange and stripes). You make a toast in a poem to the tiger’s beauty saying, “to the stripes of the tiger.” My point is that with Borges it was a lifelong romance with this animal. Do you share any of these feelings with him?

Yes, my favourite book was The Jungle Book as a child, but I also read Jim Corbett’s Maneaters of Kumaon. Tigers weren’t a lifelong romance for me as they were with Borges. Baghheera the black panther was my first love. But what tigers represent, wildness, beauty, elusiveness, freedom, danger – that was all in place as my pantheon by a very early age.

In your poem, “Tiger drinking at the Forest Pool,” you employ a tighter stanzaic structure than in your longer narrative poems. This poem is also predominantly tetrameter, which recalls Blake’s famous poem, “Tyger, Tyger, Burning Bright.” Is there something of the literary tradition of English ballad meter coming out in this poem? Also, were you at all conscious of Blake while writing about tigers?

You can’t not be aware of Blake, wrting about tigers, but of cours,e he may never have seen a real tiger, and I was keen on the physical reality, the biology and ecology of real wild tigers. The poem that informed my sonnet most was George Herbert’s poem “Prayer”, which is also a series of images for the thing alluded to in the title.

I have a feeling, but I can’t be sure of this, that British poets draw far more consciously and freely on specific poems from the pre-19th century English canon and poetry tradition, than most North American poets do.

How do you approach the poetic language of the natural world in Soho Leopard? These are not poems of the English landscape, nor are the animals indigenous to England. Where do the images come from: reading books, visiting the zoo, your travels, or research?

Well, urban foxes are very indigenous to England! But the whole thing is informed by my tiger journeys and tiger research. I have also been writing a column for the Times on wild animals, both the science and biology of them but also myths about them. So I suppose, in my constant search in poetry to make connexions between very far apart constellations, I am always reaching both to science and myth, looking for how and where they touch. And landscape. I am happiest, and feel most alive, in jungle and forests.

The tiger sequence began when the generator fell out of our car on a mountain road in Sumatra last summer adn we had to wait for hours beside the road. I already had the translations from Chinese tiger paintings in my laptop, so I sat down by the side of the road and worked on them. Though they are in the voice of a Chinese painter, the landscape of black tree stumps and sawmills is that of Sumatra. I loved Asian forests; but the destruction that is happening to them appalled me.

How has your work with Greek tragedy informed your poetry? Is the academic rigor somehow still present, or is it completely divorced from the creative process?

Yes, you’re dead right, Greek tragedy is everywhere in my work. The myths of course; and the dramatic structures; and the sense of precarious relationship. But most of all, tragic choral lyrics. The poet who influenced me most when I was 17 and 18 was Gerard Manley Hopkins, another classicist poet. I learned “The Wreck of the Deutschland” by heart- I think it is behind the complex long lyrics I tend to do now. His unpublished treatise on the choral lyrics of Greek tragedy is somewhere in a university archive in Dublinm I think. I spent twenty years studying the same lyrics. They were for a long time my core iage of a poem you live in. Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus, the balances and compound adjectives of these songs, their sense of mysterious divinity and wild intricate imagery – I loved them.

From bbc.co.uk Cambridgeshire,

RUTH PADEL – multi-talented great-great-granddaughter of Darwin…

Jan Gilbert talks to Ruth Padel

Imagine the pressure; your father taught Greek and became a psychoanalyst, your mother was a botanist, one of your great-great-grandfathers was a concert pianist and the other was Charles Darwin! Jan Gilbert finds out how Ruth Padel lives up to that!

***************

Ruth Padel’s biography makes for inspiring reading. She’s a prize-winning poet; has taught Greek at Oxford, opera at Princeton, and horse-riding in Berlin; has excavated Minoan tombs on Crete; sung in an Istanbul nightclub; was a judge for the 2005 Aventis Science Prize for the Royal Society; and was the first female fellow of Wadham College, Oxford.

While her varied achievements and experiences will doubtless cause a few dropped jaws, Ruth herself couldn’t be more modest. At CRASSH (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities) in Cambridge, for a reading from her latest work Tigers in Red Weather, she told me, when the subject of her impressive CV comes up. “I’m not very good at feeling proud. I enjoy what I’ve done, but I want to do more!” she continued, laughing.

Ruth’s background is an eclectic mix of arts and science; her father taught Greek before becoming a psychoanalyst, and her mother was a botanist. Then, of course, there are her great-great-grandfathers: one, the scientist Charles Darwin; the other, a concert pianist in Leipzig and founder member of the York Symphony Orchestra.

No wonder Ruth quite reasonably sees the arts and sciences as interlinked, entangled. “Science and poetry are very similar: you have to see something and describe it as clearly and concretely as you can. …Darwin loved form; he’s always saying he loved the rich, complex forms of what he looked at. And that’s so like poetry, and that’s what I like about poetry too,” she enthused.

“I’ve only recently begun to realise Darwin’s influence on me. He’d always just sort of been there.”

As well as seven collections of poetry, Ruth has five books of non-fiction to her name. As you might expect, these are wide-ranging, covering subjects as diverse as rock music, Greek tragedy, poetry criticism, and, now, a travel memoir, Tigers in Red Weather,

But Tigers in Red Weather is much more than a travel book; it’s about loss and survival, poetry and science; it’s a study in natural history; an exploration of threatened Asian jungles by a woman who has travelled with and questioned scientists and conservationists struggling to protect the forest and its denizens from poachers, mining, logging, and development.

To hear Ruth speak of her travels through Asia is by turns. To hear Ruth speak of her travels through Asia is by turns enthralling, inspiring, and disquieting. She tells me how a meeting with a biologist in Burma opened her eyes to the extent of surveillance there. Frustrated with how unproductive the meeting had been, Ruth mentioned it to some Burmese poets she’d met, only to be told how lucky she was that the biologist had agreed to speak to her at all. Ruth explained, “immediately after I’d gone, she would have had to write, and probably tape, an exact record of what I said, and what she said to me; and if it didn’t tally with at least two people from her own staff, who would be reporting on her, she’d be in trouble.”

She told me of her time in Sumatra where she stayed with an extraordinary Gloucestershire woman who “was running single-handed a huge espionage ring against the tiger poaching in the forests”. In fact so sophisticated was this anti-poaching operation that a member of MI6 told its coordinator that she didn’t need any advice from him!

Statue of Charles Darwin in Shrewsbury

For Ruth, Tigers in Red Weather has brought home her connection with her renowned forefather, whose complete works have been published recently online. “It’s funny,” she confessed, “I’ve only recently begun to realise Darwin’s influence on me. He’d always just sort of been there. I’d read the Origin of Species a long time ago, and there was lots of family lore, but when I started researching my tiger book, I started reading him seriously.

“When he writes in his diary about first setting eyes on tropical vegetation, he’s so excited, and he says, ‘It has been to me a glorious day, like giving to a blind man eyes.’ And that’s what I felt when I first walked in a tropical jungle. But also his excitement came from the page to the thing, which is mine too. You know I was a very bookish child, …and my love of the wild was lit partly by reading, by the Jungle Book, by Ernest Thompson Seton, and by Bambi.”

Just as reading has inspired her, Ruth is hopeful that writing, and her book Tigers in Red Weather, will keep conservation in the public eye. She told me about the Chinese government and how “their demand for tiger skin and bone is decimating the population of tigers”. She cited Chinese control of Tibet as a case in point, noting how the Chinese government encourages Tibetans, against their wishes, to perform dances wearing tiger skins for tourists.

Proving the impact of writing about these issues, she mentioned a report on the Tibetan situation by the Environmental Investigation Agency; a report made available at a recent conference in Geneva. “The reports were piled up outside the conference room,” explained Ruth, “and somebody from the Investigation Agency saw the Chinese government delegate creep up when he thought he was unobserved, take all the reports out, cross the road in Geneva, and put them in the skip.” She continued, “So obviously writing makes a difference, as they don’t want the publications to appear! Writing is important, getting it out there is important.”