Migration and Survival in Poetry and Prose

We Are All From Somewhere Else

In ninety richly varied poems and illuminating prose interludes, Ruth Padel weaves science, myth, wild nature and human history to conjure a world created and sustained by migration.

A vertiginous compendium, a prodigy, a book of wonders: it is Montaigne’s and Darwin’s 21st-century child

A broad-ranging meditation on all things migratory...This is a book of raw interfaces and unnerving encounters. Magnificent poems... a triumph of imagistic ingenuity

(A) thoughtful and often quite magical mix of prose and poetry…What is just as fascinating as Padel’s central theme is the insight that she also gives us into poetry, or rather, into the creation of a poem.

The Mara Crossing is a major meditation on migration. The prose is crystalline, the poems full of the wonderful material stuff of life. It's a poet's book to the core, a passionate exploration of her subject, proving that pressures on cells, bodies, creatures (human and other), and on the planet itself, are fit and essential matter for poetry

A glorious fabric, weaving lyricism and hard facts, poetic insight and scientific detail unwinding from the multitudinous threads of geographical migration. A beautiful, far-ranging book about physical journeys and all they might mean to humans and animals alike

In this sweeping an unconventional book about migration, Padels commendably calls for compassion and open borders. Her poems and essays are a lyrical tribute to the instincts and whims that catalyse movement, and the trials and beauties that come with motion... there are wonders of nature in this collection which will give pause to sensitive readers

In an original, wonderfully imaginative series of reflections, moving between essayistic insights, condensed metaphors of poetry, mysteries of microbiology and animal or human journeys, Ruth Padel takes migration as her subject and the whole earth as her province. A thrilling, poignant, richly illuminating investigation of the energies which create life and drive history

Who would have thought that a poet would write about one of the most fascinating aspects of behavioural biology and human striving? A remarkable, beautifully constructed book, interleaving science and history, clear prose and evocative poems

Professor Patrick Bateson, President of the Zoological Society of London

This book is an extraordinary mixture of poetry, prose, fact and fantasy.

An engrossing meditation on the theme of migration…reads like a collaboration between Dorothy Wordsworth and Darwin.

*First published as The Mara Crossing, now with new and updated material* 
 
'A prodigy, a book of wonders. Wonder, pity and terror, the searing section of voices in transit coercing compassion - and beyond that, empathy' Independent 
 
Home is where you start from, but where is a swallow's real home? And what does 'native' mean if the English oak is an immigrant from Spain? 
 
In ninety richly varied poems and illuminating prose interludes, Ruth Padel weaves science, myth, wild nature and human history to conjure a world created and sustained by migration - from the millennia-old journeys of cells, trees, birds and beasts to Geese battle raging winds over Mount Everest, lemurs skim precipices in Madagascar and wildebeest, at the climax of their epic trek from Tanzania, braving a river filled with the largest crocodiles in Africa. 
 
Human migration has shaped civilisation but today is one of the greatest challenges the world faces. In a series of incisive portraits, Padel turns to the struggles of human displacement - the Flight into Egypt, John James Audubon emigrating to America (feeding migrant birds en route), migrant workers in Mumbai and refugees labouring over a drastically changing planet - to show how the purpose of migration, for both humans and animals, is survival.

Poems on a Life

Beethoven Variations

From the author of the bestselling Darwin: A Life in Poems, Ruth Padel's new collection follows in the footsteps of one of the world's greatest composers, Beethoven, and investigates what his life and music might mean to us today

How to uncover from biographical details the mystery that is music? With precision, heart-breaking beauty and lyric insight, Ruth Padel performs a miracle: Beethoven comes alive before us, the son of a drunk, who became a genius, and lost everything, and found his way back to the center. And here we are, following Padel's own genius for composing the music of a story via lyrical means. You will find your heart shored up / by meeting the trapped brilliance of his eyes, she writes. Indeed

Poetry, biography, music and memoir collide in this wonderful collection from Ruth Padel... A tender and evocative portrait of the man and his music, and most of all the profound ways it affects listeners and performers

Padel's imagery and imagination took me deeper into Beethoven than many biographies I've read... Padel knows her history. But a poet is free to inhabit her subject and elaborate on the record

What a wonderful and unusual idea. Ruth Padel writes with true passion; her love for, and understanding of, the man and his music shine through each poem

Beethoven’s music encompasses the entire blinding spectrum of human thought and emotion, from violent to ethereal, from chaos to sublimity. Ruth Padel’s poems encompass that uncontainable spirit to an astounding degree, and preserve the primal shock of our first hearing

Alex Ross, author of The Rest is Noise, music critic of the New Yorker

Ruth Padel is a prizewinning poet, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and Professor of Poetry at King’s College London. Her recent collections include Darwin: A Life in Poems, on her great-grandfather Charles Darwin; The Mara Crossing, on migration and immigration; Tidings: A Christmas Journey, and Emerald, a poignant elegy for her mother. She lives in London.

From the author of the bestselling Darwin: A Life in Poems, Ruth Padel’s new collection follows in the footsteps of one of the world’s greatest composers, Beethoven, and investigates what his life and music might mean to us today 
 
Two hundred and fifty years since Beethoven was born, Ruth Padel goes on a personal search for him, retracing his steps through war-torn Europe of the early nineteenth century, delving into his music, letters, diaries and the conversation books he used when deaf, to uncover the man behind the legend. Her quest, exploring the life of one of the most creative artists who ever lived, turns more personal than she expects, taking her into the sources of her own creativity and musicality. From a deeply musical family herself, Padel’s parents met through music, and she grew up playing chamber music on viola – Beethoven’s instrument as a child. Her father’s grandfather, a concert pianist born on the German–Danish border, studied in Leipzig with a friend of Beethoven before immigrating to the UK. The poems in this illuminating biography in verse conjure not only Beethoven’s life and personality, but her own music-making and love both of the European music-making tradition to which her father’s family belongs, and to the continent itself Europe.

Emerald

An elegy to a lost mother, Emerald is the moving new collection from prize-winning poet Ruth Padel

A profoundly moving, complex, glittering elegy for her brilliant mother

Emerald is a book of a wild and generous imagination from a writer at the peak of her powers. It offers up a rich excavation of the truths and mysteries found in grief – and should be of interest to any reader concerned with the limitations and beauty of the human condition. Padel has created a collection that is very much alive with uniquely restless, questioning intensity

Emerald’s themes are broad as well as attentive to the intimate. Padel writes with an acute awareness that the mundane can gesture towards the profound

If Ruth Padel is one our national treasures – and she most certainly is – then her latest book of poems will surely rank as one of her greatest achievements to date... lyrical reflections on the human condition... an intensely beautiful portrait of final farewells... Padel has made great art out of her ingenious – and utterly satisfying – blending of lyric memoir, natural history, and travel writing, defying the limitations poets all too often place on themselves... Everyone should read Emerald, it's as valuable as the title implies

Padel capture(s) small details with a lightness and freshness which has genuine staying power. Her skill at selecting the telling visual moment implies how a good parent may extend and deepen their child’s understanding of the world. It also enacts its own process of hidden things becoming visible, part of the labour of emerald mining and cutting that Padel explores to illustrate her passage into healing

Ruth Padel's story, of a daughter's love for her mother, allows her to reach for a movingly selfless language of human relations. She brings back never-before-seen jewels from those places where the mind goes to take refuge from grief

An elegy to a lost mother, Emerald is the moving new collection from prize-winning poet Ruth Padel 
 
‘Here in deep earth, the black 
blossom of mourning still sifting within me 
I remembered that emerald was my birthstone …’ 
 
 
Prize-winning poet Ruth Padel’s heartfelt new collection is a grief observed: an elegy for her mother on her death at the age of ninety-seven. 
 
Exploring the riches of emerald lore, Padel follows the glint of green – ‘green for awakening / for bringing life back from the dead’ – from memories of her mother, a naturalist, to the black honeycomb of a Colombian emerald mine and sunset-pink of the Emerald City, Jaipur. Beneath everything shines the jewel itself, ‘the only stone in which the flaws are prized’. 
 
Beautifully carved and cadenced, Emerald is a moving chronicle of value and loss, and a celebration of all that is precious in the life that remains.

A Christmas Journey

Tidings

An enchanting full-length narrative poem, which takes us round the world at Christmas

A literary and emotional feat… Tidings is an eloquent reminder that life is hard, kindness is all and that the Christmas story goes deep… A moving poem just asking to be read aloud, with different people playing each part – angel, child, tramp, fox and helper – this Christmas.

[This] exquisite-looking hardback is a lovely reminder of seasonal magic.

It’s not just a special seasonal book, it is a real challenge to both commercialized and sentimental versions of Christmas.

Magical... a literary and emotional feat (elegantly illustrated in red, white, black and gold) .Padel is too wise to allow sentimentality to tug at her sleeve. What she does, brilliantly, is to see off the sense of resignation that can set in at Christmas. Tidings is an eloquent reminder that life is hard, kindness is all and that the Christmas story goes deep. No sermon, this, but a moving poem just asking to be read aloud.

A gorgeous Christmas poem...meant to be read aloud, explores what Christmas might mean to us today -- not just a time of celebration but also of conflict and loneliness. Lyrically beautiful, and accompanied by gorgeous illustrations by Sarah Young.

Beautifully illustrated and exquisitely musical, Tidings is a poem to be read out loud and cherished. 
 
‘Come with me 
to St Pancras Old Church, on a little London hill...’ 
 
It’s Christmas Eve and on this enchanted night Charoum, the Angel of Silence, can speak. As night turns to day, he unfolds a resonant story of a little girl, a homeless man and a fox... 
 
In the tradition of Charles Dickens and Dylan Thomas, Tidings takes us on a journey into the heart of Christmas, showing us celebrations down the ages and across the globe – as dawn sweeps from East Australia to Bethlehem, from London to the Statue of Liberty in New York. 
 
This is Christmas in all its magic, reminding us that it is a time not only of good tidings, but of loneliness and longing, compassion and connection.

Fusewire

Fusewire has the fierce historical awareness and linguistic energy of Ruth Padel's previous collections but moves into new territory and new clarity. Poems on British activity in Ireland through the ages intrude on an intensely moving series of love poems which reverse sexual clichés of colonisation: here Britain is female and Ireland the high-profile man. 
 
From the prize-winning poet of Rembrandt Would Have Loved You, Voodoo Shop and The Soho Leopard, all shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth

Ruth Padel’s powerful new collection on the Middle East

There are points where one feels Padel is a poetic Daniel Barenboim. It is inlaid poetry... as if Padel were embroidering a tapestry. Each poem turns out to be an instrument and Padel knows how to play. Her command of register is masterly… There is no doubting Padel's accomplishment, her poems stand tall partly because she tends to rise about the personal.

Padel is one of our most talented writers. She turns her multi-layered poetic attention to the Middle East, seeking peace and harmony through sensitive and moving poems that offer hope even as they reflect upon struggle.

Lyrical and sensual, albeit with a keen awareness that in war zones, music, love and poetry are sidelined even as they become more vital. Padel skilfully juxtaposes the modern world with the ancient.

Padel's great characteristic is her range. Making an Oud interweaves contemporary Middle Eastern politics, the history and culture of the Abrahamic religions, natural beauty and love poetry. Padel is not writing partisan polemic but attempting something much more difficult, a kind of cultural synthesis.

Superb collection… Sorrowful and elegiac...though it ends on a note not entirely without hope

Her prolific and passionate creativity is proof that “making is our defence against the dark”

This is a book of dark, broken melodies, consciously beautiful, underpinned by pain and terror

A poet of great eloquence and delicate skill, an exquisite image-maker who can work wonders with the great tradition of line and stanza. Her voice has an astonishing resonance.

With extraordinary breadth of erudition, a sensitivity to different cultural environments and powerful visual alertness, this collection has all the characteristics we have learned to expect from Ruth Padel. Readers will be struck by the mature command of these poems as well as their great range of subject and feeling.

Ruth Padel is a prize-winning poet, Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Zoological Society of London, and first Resident Writer at Somerset House, London. Her collections include Rembrandt Would Have Loved You, Voodoo Shop and The Soho Leopard, all shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and more recently Darwin: A Life in Poems, shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award. 
 
Highly acclaimed for her nature writing in a book about conservation, Tigers in Red Weather, and her novel, Where the Serpent Lives, she has also published books on contemporary poetry, including 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem and The Poem and the Journey. 
 
In 2014, Ruth Padel is the first Writer in Residence at Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and is recording her experiences in her blog at http://www.ruthpadel.com/blog/.

'Making is our defence against the dark...' 
 
Through images of conflict and craftsmanship, Ruth Padel’s powerful new poems address the Middle East, tracing a quest for harmony in the midst of destruction. An oud, the central instrument of Middle Eastern music , is made and broken. An ancient synagogue survives attacks, a Palestinian boy in a West Bank refugee camp learns capoeira, and a guide shows us Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity during a siege. At the heart of the book are Christ’s last words from the Cross. 
 
Uniting this moving collection is the common ground shared by Judaism, Christianity and Islam: a vision of human life as pilgrimage and struggle but also as music and making. With care and empathy, Ruth Padel suggests how rifts in the Holy Land speak to conflict in our own hearts. 'We identify. Some chasm / through the centre must be in and of us all.'

Ruth Padel

'One of our most gifted poets turns her gaze to the terrain of girlhood: Padel taps into that unique and beautiful time where all the mystery, wonder and mythmaking fold into each other. This is tender and exquisite poetry'

'In these searching, restless poems, Ruth Padel excavates the violence, beauty and danger of girlhood, asking again and again “Who makes you girl? When does it stop?” Formally inventive and with a dazzling control of the lyric line, Padel uses the poem as time travelling machine, examining the acts of resistance that connect girls to the women they will become'

Kim Moore, author of All the Men I Never Married

'This collection touched many things that have moved me in worlds I thought separate. The female body: what it means for men to look at, and women to inhabit, that maze of underground yearnings that snakes from Knossos to Kerala via Camden. Ruth Padel, Mistress of the Labyrinth, invites the reader to follow her into the dark. And to the light beyond'

Neil MacGregor, author of Living with the Gods

'Ruth Padel's new work is a dazzling paean to the many phases of Girl – mother to the woman, mother to the Mother, and mother to the Goddess who ‘waits like a taproot in the deepest layer of the Cretan earth’. It is also a hymn to the catastrophic beauty of life, to the brave human plunge into ‘all that dark involvement without knowing why’. Above all, it is an anthem to innocence, that fragile yet resilient mother of experience and wisdom. Radiant, powerful and deeply moving, these poems celebrate Girl not just as noun, but as ongoing sacred verb'

Arundhathi Subramaniam, author of Wild Women

Padel’s lucid poems traverse a spiritual quest through ancient mythology, mysticism, European fairy tales

A fresh and questioning look at girlhood and its icons, unravelling the millennia of myth woven around girls. 
 
'One of our most gifted poets ... This is tender and exquisite poetry' Mona Arshi, author of Small Hands 
 
In Girl, Ruth Padel presents a triptych of interlocking sequences. A moving retelling of the Christian story transforms the Virgin Mary into a girl in a Primark T-shirt, facing a life shaped by divine will. Unearthed from the Cretan labyrinth, a prehistoric Snake Goddess is reshaped at the hands of a male archaeologist. 
 
Between these evocative figures, myth turns personal. Delicately crafted lyrics, sometimes taking adventurous shapes, explore snapshots from the poet’s own life blended with archetypes from India, European fairy tale, ancient Greece and Urban Dictionary: girl as soul, girl as creative energy, girl as the sacred power of nature, vulnerable but unstoppable. ‘Listening to the snowmelt / of the patriarchy’, Girl is an urgent, revelatory work for today. 
 
**A Poetry Book Society Special Commendation** 
 
'Dazzling' Kim Moore, author of All the Men I Never Married 
'Beautiful' Linda Gregerson, author of The Selvedge

Ruth Padel

Praise for Girl

'One of our most gifted poets turns her gaze to the terrain of girlhood: Padel taps into that unique and beautiful time where all the mystery, wonder and mythmaking fold into each other. This is ten ...

'In these searching, restless poems, Ruth Padel excavates the violence, beauty and danger of girlhood, asking again and again “Who makes you girl? When does it stop?” Formally inventive and with a d ...

'This collection touched many things that have moved me in worlds I thought separate. The female body: what it means for men to look at, and women to inhabit, that maze of underground yearnings that snakes fr ...

'One of our most gifted poets turns her gaze to the terrain of girlhood: Padel taps into that unique and beautiful time where all the mystery, wonder and mythmaking fold into each other. This is ten ...

'In these searching, restless poems, Ruth Padel excavates the violence, beauty and danger of girlhood, asking again and again “Who makes you girl? When does it stop?” Formally inventive and with a d ...

'This collection touched many things that have moved me in worlds I thought separate. The female body: what it means for men to look at, and women to inhabit, that maze of underground yearnings that snakes fr ...

'One of our most gifted poets turns her gaze to the terrain of girlhood: Padel taps into that unique and beautiful time where all the mystery, wonder and mythmaking fold into each other. This is ten ...

'In these searching, restless poems, Ruth Padel excavates the violence, beauty and danger of girlhood, asking again and again “Who makes you girl? When does it stop?” Formally inventive and with a d ...

'This collection touched many things that have moved me in worlds I thought separate. The female body: what it means for men to look at, and women to inhabit, that maze of underground yearnings that snakes fr ...

Books by Ruth Padel

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter