Angel
Bloodaxe Books, 1993, Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
ISBN 1-85224-278-7. Contact us for copies, £6.95
plus £2 p & p.
DESCRIPTION
Angel, written while Ruth Padel was also writing Whom
Gods Destroy, about madness in different societies,
opens with voices from Bedlam. A demented starling, a corrupted
GI, an alien planning world takeover from the sea bed.
Part II sets these in a background of war and decay, a
world in might be mad not to go mad in. Part III expresses
the same thing through erotic narratives of lunatic innocence;
to which Part IV adds quirky myths and historical perspectives.
But Part V suggests the previous poems could have come
from a bedlam patient, hiding from her doctor behind invented
voices.
At the end we seem to hear
the patient's voice directly, without the voice-mask
of an alien persona. And
his voice,
describing her. Then, at their war-frontier
between other and self, doctor and patient say goodbye. But who was ventriloquizing
whom? Is madness the angel-alien in both? Was he one of her voices, or
was she his?
REVIEWS
"A collection set in the disturbed surreal. The
words shiver with excitement and whole poems are like firebreaks
in the forest. 'Indian Red' is a subtle, controlled exploration
of anger and loss. Several poems explore the rub between
two cultures, where imbalance of power leads to a corruption
of relationship in which one voice persistently drowns out
another." -Times Literary Supplement
" The poems glide forward,
ruthless, rich and cool, refracting the world and glinting
as they go. They fall free:
only when
you get to the end do you realize that what she has been
saying has had a story to tell." - Selima Hill
"She has fierce humour. Her
poems speed, never out of the fast lane. You feel you've
been on a train that
has
crashed right through the barriers of the station".
- Poetry
Ireland Review
"Who or what is Padel's
angel? A voice outside ourselves, a changing shape, a cheeky
cherubic thing, a
madness, a glorious
energy and a fall from grace. Like the best writer of fictions,
Padel slides easily into the skins of others. A fierce
intellect supplying violent turbulent poems of a world where
nothing
stays still for long, using myth and reinterpreting history
playfully to show us a universe constantly reinventing
itself." - Maura Dooley, Acumen
" Angel is a fierce piece
of work; I can scarcely imagine what it took to take in -
to take into consciousness - what she has made into art here." - Alicia
Ostriker
"Angel describes an absurd
nightmare-country, where things in equal parts ludicrous
and terrible occur, and then
makes us recognize contemporary England... Truly strange
and worth striving for." - Poetry London Newsletter
"Religious language is a strong source of vocabulary
among the already spectacular collection in her possession.
Her work is very powerful: as in the stunning poem "Harvest
Moon". Many poets wait a lifetime for a poem like this
and still don't get one". - Poetry Review
"Padel's
poetry is striking for scrupulous diction, chameleon-like
adoption of voice, powerful emotional appeal,
and the range of its interests, whether exploring the mind
of a seventeenth-century British botanist or a character
in Apocalypse Now." - Stephen Bernstein, Poetry
Department, University of Michigan
"Weird,
gripping little narratives in a wide range of accents, tones, and moods.
The varied settings and subject-matter,
the human sympathies and richness of language makes this
an absorbing book." - Fleur Adcock, Poetry Book
Society Bulletin
"All the verbal
dynamism, upended perspective and implosive fire I look for and so rarely
find in English
poetry. The
inventive vocabulary, imagery, and energy burn, and energize
the nerves. Great." - Jeremy Reed.
Read
a poem from Angel
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