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Ruth PadelRuth Padel
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Critical perspective
BiographyRuth Padel was born in London. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London. She wrote a PhD on Greek tragedy at Oxford University, taught Greek at Oxford, Cambridge and Birkbeck College, London (and opera in Princeton Modern Greek Department), and then became a freelance writer, doing features and reviews for many newspapers including The Independent, The Times and New York Times; and broadcasting for BBC Radio 3 and 4.
She was Poet in Residence for the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts in 2002, the first Resident Writer at Somerset House 2008, and Resident Writer at Christs College Cambridge in 2009. Her radio work includes a BBC Radio 3 series of talks on opera, and an acclaimed series of programmes for Radio 4 on Hans Andersen, Edward Elgar, Tennyson and Charles Darwin. She invented the 'Sunday Poem' discussion column for The Independent on Sunday, on which her book, 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem (2002) is based, and wrote it for three years. She wrote a monthly column, 'Wild Thing' for The Times, on wild animals in myth, literature and ecology and takes an active part in tiger conservation.
Ruth Padel has published a pamphlet of poems, Alibi (1985), and seven collections: Summer Snow (1990); Angel (1993), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; Fusewire (1996); Rembrandt Would Have Loved You (1998), a Poetry Book Society Choice; Voodoo Shop (2002), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award; The Soho Leopard (2004), a Poetry Book Society Choice shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize; and Darwin: A Life in Poems (2009), shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award.
Her writing about poetry includes 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem (2002), a snapshot of contemporary poetry in Britain with in-depth discussions of individual poems; The Poem and the Journey (2007), containing accessible analyses of 60 more contemporary poems and an acute introduction on why we need poetry; Silent Letters of the Alphabet (2010), the popular lectures she gave at Newcastle in 2008, on poetry's use of silence and implication; and Walter Ralegh (2010), her seletction and introduction to the verse of Sir Walter Raleigh.
She has also published short stories in Dublin Review and Prospect Magazine, and a novel - Where the Serpent Lives (2010), the background of which is wildlife conservation, during 2005, the year of the suicide bombings in London, and completed with research supported by the British Council's Darwin Now Award programme in 2009.
Ruth Padel is a Member of the Bombay Natural History Society, Society of Authors and P.E.N.
Genres (in alphabetical order)Fiction, Literary criticism, Non-fiction, Poetry, Short stories, Travel
BibliographyAlibi Many Press, 1985 Summer Snow Hutchinson, 1990 In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self Princeton University Press, 1992 Angel Bloodaxe, 1993 Fusewire Chatto & Windus, 1996 Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness Princeton University Press, 1996 Rembrandt Would Have Loved You Chatto & Windus, 1998 I'm a Man: Sex, Gods and Rock 'n' Roll Faber and Faber, 2000 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem (reprinted Vintage, 2004) Chatto & Windus, 2002 Voodoo Shop Chatto & Windus, 2002 The Soho Leopard Chatto & Windus, 2004 Tigers in Red Weather Little Brown, 2005 Tennyson, Selected Poems The Folio Society, 2006 The Poem and the Journey Chatto & Windus, 2007 Darwin: A Life in Poems Chatto & Windus, 2009 Silent Letters of the Alphabet Bloodaxe, 2010 Sir Walter Ralegh Faber, 2010 Where the Serpent Lives Little, Brown, 2010
Prizes and awards1997 National Poetry Competition ('Icicles Round a Tree in Dumfriesshire') 1998 T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlist) Rembrandt Would Have Loved You 2001 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem) (shortlist - 'Rubies and Rattlesnakes') 2002 T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlist) Voodoo Shop 2002 Whitbread Poetry Award (shortlist) Voodoo Shop 2003 Cholmondeley Award 2004 T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlist) Soho Leopard 2006 Dolman First Travel Book Prize (shortlist) Tigers in Red Weather 2008 Society of Authors Travel Award 2009 Costa Poetry Award (shortlist) Darwin: A Life in Poems
Critical Perspective
'A good poem is a love affair of sound and sense', Ruth Padel has pithily observed, and she proves this in her own writing, whether as a literary critic or as a boldly emotional, verbally energetic poet. She has gathered many plaudits as well as controversy, and enjoyed a popular platform for her rigorously informative newspaper column 'The Sunday Poem', a popular feature for two and a half years from 1998 onwards in The Independent on Sunday newspaper. Her background is as a classical scholar specializing in Ancient Greece, but she has also drawn on her wide sweep of interests in music, religion, psychology, and gender studies. This eclectic approach has resulted in scholarly works such as In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self (1992) as well as the more populist I'm a Man: Sex, Gods and Rock 'n' Roll (2000), the latter ingeniously suggesting the mythic origins of opera, rock music and its masculine icons. Her most recent critical book, 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem (2002), is a selection from her 'Sunday Poem' articles. Despite a modish subtitle, How Modern Poetry Can Change Your Life, it offers highly informative close-reading insights into mainly contemporary works, alternating male and female poets, from Paul Muldoon to Carol Ann Duffy, Sean O'Brien to Jo Shapcott and many others. Its claim that 'we are in the middle of a large-scale renaissance of poetry in Britain today' seems justified by the qualities she uncovers. Her intentions are directed towards readers: she relished their letters and sought to inform them about 'technical things like rhythm and rhyme, but also poetry's relation to the media, the position of women in poetry, what has happened … since the eighties, and why'. This makes her sound high-minded, yet as a poet she has been hailed as the 'sexiest voice in British poetry'. (Maggie Farrell)
By her own account, the crucial poets for Padel's development were Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Greek lyric and tragic poets, Tennyson, Donne, Yeats, Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot, as well as Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop. (Ezra Pound's influence also surely shows in a mixing of the classical and the contemporary, her lines often richly encrusted with gem-like images and compound words). Her National Poetry Competition winning poem 'Icicles Around a Tree in Dumfrieshire', from 1996, is however a highly original work that imbues observations of ice sculptures with erotic energy and concepts from physics. A conspicuous feature of her recent work is its appreciation of consumerism. She might win an award from advertisers for flamboyant 'product placement': her poems are full of the likes of Ryanair, Gordon's Gin, or Borders bookstore; the names of supermarkets, designer clothes labels, and exotic travel locations. Icons of rock and pop music, from Hendrix and Marley to Tori Amos, are invoked: in a poem called 'White Horse' she places a reference to Thomas Malory alongside 'the lyre of Iggy Pop'. In much of her poetry pleasure is an essential companion of romantic regret. Her speakers are passionate, at times mentally estranged or ecstatic. Hedonism rules: 'I etch / A fingernail down your spine / … Making the bread-board rise / To its feet, the dog beneath us whine, / And Sainsbury's poultry burn' ('Home Cooking'). As such lines indicate, she occasionally runs the risk of bathos, but is more often wonderfully able to convey passion.
Her poetry started off in a rather different manner. Padel's first collection was inspired by Greece and Crete, but Angel (1993) was gloomily preoccupied with states of madness and emotional conflicts, featuring drug-stoned soldiers in wars from Vietnam to the Gulf. 'Voices from Bedlam' gives speech to demented creatures: a starling, prison inmates, colonists, and a blind man's wife. Some poems are experimental in form and far from accessible. But the outstanding poem in the book, 'Harvest Moon', looks forward to the sinuous emotional complexities of her best work, its two lovers being imagined as oriental hand puppets, 'resinous figurines / requiring three manipulators'. There are two pages of notes to Fusewire (1996), and its poems place personal conflicts within the history of Britain's involvements in Ireland from Elizabethan times to 'the Troubles'. This is a 'High-Risk Country': 'Mad Dog' personifies a terrorist killer as Achilles, and the presence of British soldiers is traced to the 'pacification of Munster, 1583'. Only with Rembrandt Would Have Loved You (1998), did Padel reach poetic maturity. Its discontinuous sequence of poems follows the progress of a love affair with a rich panorama of ecstasies, jealousy, rhapsodies and depression. Food and sex come together: 'he could smell cumin from her curry a mile off / And his breathing had a hotline to her breasts' ('The Musicians Gallery'). The poet can now afford post-feminist notes, 'a meta-Spice Girls joke', and pictures herself 'swabbing the New World Grill / with tears' ('Clearing Up'). Like most of the best affairs, things end badly, with a 'fugue of held-in hurt', while her lover is just a 'Man trying to Unite his Life with a Scratched CD'.
Eros is again 'the destroyer' in Voodoo Shop (2002), which was nominated for both the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award. We as readers are transported by word magic to witness scenes in Brazil, New Orleans, Cannes, 'Surf Rage at Bondi Beach'. Interwoven amongst the travels of two adulterous lovers are poems that hit the elegiac strain, mourning a deceased father ('The Grief Maps', 'Hot Ash'), while others suggest similar pain and loss as the sources of inspiration for women artists, from Bridget Riley to the singer Tori Amos. The latter's 'favourite red silk number from Monsoon' takes its place with designer items by Issy Miyake and Paul Smith elsewhere, alongside the more mundane: ('your face / was a Wash n' Go ad baptizing my hair'), Biba nail-varnish, even 'Sainsbury's Moroccan spuds'.
Padel's sheer vivacity in this volume is well-demonstrated in exotic narrative poems such as 'Rattlesnakes and Rubies'. The lovers are in a jewellery shop in Rio de Janeiro, imagining 'How jewel-hunters of Brazil are feather-probing leagues / Of chocolate earth, sifting a mine-wall's sixty-five-foot dance / Of ladder silhouettes', and 'jewel-surgeons, droves of them, in action, / Making the perfect cut. "Marquise", "Brilliante", "Classic Drop" '. They see 'the jungle's tapestries, wagon wheels of umbrella-fern', then retreat back to their hotel, overlooking boys playing soccer 'in soft sapphire dusk / To an audience of rearing, floodlit, diamond surf'. In the 'Voodoo Shop' of the title poem, the lovers visit a fortune teller, then a 'voodoo Harrods', wanting 'Feathers and candles, powders / That work magic in the dark like phosphorous crystals / . … plus the full / Cast of the Tarot'. The 'Scarlet Lady' is a garish tourist doll, symbol of their affair's finale in New Orleans, vulnerable to a wife's greater power: 'We're all in extremis here'. Vivid and melodramatic as her best poems are, they are also the product of a fascinating imagination. And, like an insistent lover, they simply demand your attention.
Dr. Jules Smith, 2003
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