Poetry | Ruth Padel
The Mara Crossing (Chatto & Windus, January 2012)
Ruth Padel’s new collection offers a unique perspective on migration and immigration. Buy now on Amazon Read this Interview on it with Ruth in The National http://bit.ly/AEuzPB “We’re all from somewhere else.” The poet and writer Ruth Padel is talking about one of the most important lines in her new book, The Mara Crossing. It’s(read more…)
Darwin – A Life in Poems
An intimate, highly original interpretation of the life and work of Charles Darwin by his great great grand-daughter This highly acclaimed sequence of poems uses multiple viewpoints to follow the development of Darwin’s thought, the drama of the discovery of evolution, and the fluctuating emotions developing within the tender husband and father. Charles Darwin lost(read more…)
The Soho Leopard
Hallucinatory, lyrical, and passionately musical The Soho Leopard explores our need for wildness and for stories, adding animal legend and zoological science to Ruth Padel’s glitteringly imaginative canvas. With her gift for bringing together experiences and tones of voice that normally stay far apart, she sweeps us from Dulwich Pizza Hut to ancient Siberia, King’s(read more…)
Voodoo Shop
A twenty-first century tale of love and bereavement Voodoo Shop includes many of Ruth Padel’s unique lyric arias reminiscent of Tennyson’s Idylls, such as “Writing to Onegin”, which Times Literary Supplement called a “startling poem filled with extravagance, a marvellous example of imitation as originality, defying Pushkin’s model yet remaining true to his heroine’s psychology”;(read more…)
Rembrandt Would Have Loved You
Playing with the male lyric tradition Rembrandt Would Have Loved You focusses on the gaze of the woman artist or poet, in a woman’s eye-view of a love affair and of a man. Shifting between vulnerability and guilt, trust and doubt, tenderness, reproach and sexuality, these bold poems explore the risks and complexities of falling(read more…)
Fusewire
Poems on British colonization in Ireland interwoven with love poems which reverse sexual clichés of colonisation With the same fierce historical and linguistic energy of Summer Snow and Angel, Fusewire explores new territory, the relation between two countries and the effect of history on personal lives. As the double meaning in “Your Place or Mine?”(read more…)
Angel
“Many poets wait a lifetime for a poem like this and still don’t get one”. Angel focusses on multiple ways of seeing, across different personas and across history. Written while she was working on her book about madness in Tragedy (Whom Gods Destroy) and also during the First Gulf War, Angel was Ruth’s second full(read more…)
Summer Snow
Lyric poems moving from archaeology, decipherment and Minoan Crete to modern graffiti on Athenian cacti Ruth’s first full collection turns on history. Both family history, childhood memories, marriage, stepchildren, motherhood and a baby’s first smile, but also history experienced physically on the ground in Greece; especially Crete where Ruth used to live. The snow of(read more…)
Alibi
The Many Press, 1985, 24 pp. ISBN 0 907326 129. Number Nine in the Many Press: New Series. Some copies may be available from The Many Press, http://www.shadoof.net/many/ DESCRIPTION Ruth’s first publication, in 1985. A collector’s item: a pamphlet of lyric poems, set mainly in Greece, chosen by John Welch, editor of the Many Press.(read more…)
