Rembrandt
Would Have Loved You
CHATTO - Poetry Book Society
Choice, shortlisted for 1998 T.S. Eliot Prize - ISBN
0-7011-6715-7 Price £7.99
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'Rembrandt Would Have Loved You' online at Amazon.co.uk
DESCRIPTION
A woman's eye-view of a love affair, with
darker undercurrents of mortality and loss. Shifting between
vulnerability and
guilt, trust and doubt, tenderness, reproach and sexuality,
the bold, intimate poems explore the risks and complexities
of falling in love. Wonderfully versatile in tone, they
blend the lyrical and the colloquial, formality and wit,
myth and the Spice Girls.
This book includes the poem that
won the 1996 UK National Poetry Competition, "Icicles
Round a Tree in Dumfriesshire". Judge Jo Shapcott called it "a daring
blend of fire and ice, passion and design". "Emotion, wit, music,
texture and elegance," wrote another judge Paul Durcan. "If Wallace
Stevens and Anna Akhmatova were one and the same person, you'd have Ruth Padel".
FROM REVIEWS
"Poise, delicacy and technical venturesomeness, shining
imagination and flights of exuberant imagery: this book
contained most of the best love poems of the year." – The
Sunday Times
"An iridescent sheen of magical surface undergirded
by heart and mind and devastating depth: a poetry of risk
and dare, more Hughes than Plath, more Stevens than Frost.
The prize-winning opening poem offers enough dazzle and
flash for an entire book." Harvard Review
"This book has the quality
of a breakthrough. Padel's linguistic energy presses
at the edge of form without destroying it. Her strongly
constructed forms encapsulate the imaginative exuberance,
the reckless magic-realism of poems that go anywhere:
into space, to Brazil and Kazhakstan. We live at an
interestingly dangerous juncture: this is the womanly
erotic, with
self-conscious demandingness and mad generosity, inventing
- in Auden's phrase - "new styles of architecture".-
Carol Rumens, The Independent
"Dazzling linguistic accomplishment,
wit and self-mockery: life-enhancing and desolate at
the same time, without making a meal of it." - Bernard
O'Donoghue
"An iridescent sheen of
magical surface undergirded by heart and mind and devastating
depth: a poetry of risk and dare, more Hughes than Plath,
more Stevens than Frost. The prize-winning opening poem
offers enough dazzle and flash for an entire book." Harvard
Review
"Ruth Padel has the sexiest
voice in British poetry. Her new collection pulses with
such passion and sensuality that anyone with a dickey
ticker should be barred from her readings... Sheer linguistic
genius, with images of a peculiar powerful beauty." -
Maggie O'Farrell
"Poise, delicacy and technical
venturesomeness, shining imagination and flights of exuberant
imagery: this book contained most of the best love poems
of the year." - Alan Brownjohn, Sunday Times
"Her work has a speedy
omnivorous relish, and an aching, exactly rendered mixture
of sensuality and affection." - Sean O'Brien
"Syntax with a Browningesque
eloquence, alert to transience, shot through with danger
and risk; supple, intense writing, beautifully handled,
with a welcome strangeness and strength." - Michael O'Neill, London
Review
"One of the best love poets
in England; but with many other strings to her poetic
bow." - Ian Duhig
"With upmarket cultural
references and sexual glamour, an attractvie verbal glitter
and a register that moves between advert speak and passionate
eroticism, atomic structure and Cadbury's eggs. Her vividly
realized sensous imagery is teased into meaning, in enchanting
lyric moments, in which the fleeting passions of time
are stilled into a fragile eternity. Her finely cadenced,
beautiful fictions accord the hard truths of time, pain
and mortality their proper weight. - Times Literary
Supplement
"Very original: her book
is rightly called Rembrandt Would Have Loved You".
- P.J. Kavanagh, Daily Telegraph
"Irreverent and courageous:
a demanding poetry, like Donne's. Musically sophisticated,
but resisting the seduction of its own sound." - Poetry
Review
"Phenomenally energetic
writing: intimacy, strong characterisation and an affecting
modesty." - Michael Hofmann, The Times
"Full of verve, eloquence
and music." - Helen Dunmore, The Times
"An intense and sensitive
sequence with tremendous richness of sustained images."-
Marina Warner, Best Books, Independent on Sunday
"An extraordinary group
of love poems. Grown-up poems, written with frankness,
self-knowledge, a wry intelligence and a musical ear.
Her voice has settled into a rich, convincing fluidity,
a spry lightness of touch that almost masks her attention
to form. Most of the book is taken up with fine narrative
poems of page-turning intensity, but the collection also
contains some other notable work, including the deft
and moving elegy, "A Drink in the New Piazza". - Poetry
Book Society Bulletin
"The language has a sumptuous
rightness, tension and chastity - this is a 'Song of
Songs' for the Nineties". - Stephen Romer.
Read
a poem from Rembrandt Would Have Loved You
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