SUMMER SNOW
Hutchinson, 1990, ISBN 0-09-174285-4
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DESCRIPTION
Ruth Padel's first full collection: lyric poems
moving from archaeology, decipherment and Minoan Crete to modern
graffiti scratched on Athenian cacti, childhood memories, marriage,
stepchildren, motherhood - and a daughter's first smile.
The collection turns on history: both the history
felt physically in Greece, especially Crete where Ruth Padel
used
to live (the
snow of the title is in
a crevice on Mount Ida), and family history. The pressure of past relationships
on the present, of different peoples who have inhabited the same ground -
Minoans, Greeks, Venetians, Turks – on today's modern Greeks, undermines any modern
traveller's escapist desire to forget home pain in a glittering elsewhere.
REVIEWS
"A poet of unusual intelligence, an authoritative and
distinctive voice combined with a wonderful eye for detail.
Padel is concerned with history: history problematized not
finished, an open text waiting for interpretation. Poems of
great tact and tenderness, achievements of clarity and understanding
shared with the reader: we appreciate her interpretive gifts." - The Listener
"Her sense of history, of the past intertwining with
the present, is most poignant". - Times Literary Supplement
"`Why does the private matter?' is a question which underlies
her subject-matter and techniques in a way reminiscent of Robert
Lowell. Unexpectedness typifies the poems' texture, reflecting
the poet's concern with the disjointed nature of mental experience.
An long and impressive historical poem of considerable power
is "Siege", a poem set in the Turkish siege of
Rhodes. The book is a variety of daring experiments in bringing
together
in one fabric divergent levels of thought"
- Poetry London Newsletter
"A brilliant classical scholar with
a restless firecracker mind, Padel writes poetry the way Gwen John painted
pictures,
elliptical, evocative, with deceptively soft-edged images
that lodge sharply in the mind." - Oxford Today
"Padel's poetic background is the Mediterranean.
She is much more reminiscent of Greek writers than any English
influence. It is another way of seeing, a different palette
of colours, a distillation of light, beauty, civilization."
- Poetry Review
"With her individual blend of mystery and vivacity,
an intense and many-layered mind, an ear for rhythm and sound-colour,
the musicality of her voice and intriguing counterpoint of
ideas, she has the true poetic gift of conjuring up whole landscapes
in a few lines. The chief theme is the pathos and terror of
the processes of time, unravelled from messages left in the
ground and in the mind."
- The Brown Book, Oxford
"The unforced collocations of ancient and modern, the
legendary and the mundane, the durable and the ephemeral, suggest
a poetic intelligence of considerable range and power".
- Jem Poster, The Cambridge Review
"She is the
spiritual child of Cavafy." - Malcolm Williamson,
Literary Review
Read
A poem from Summer Snow
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