{"id":381,"date":"2014-05-10T15:39:47","date_gmt":"2014-05-10T15:39:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.obsessedbynature.com\/blog\/?p=381"},"modified":"2019-10-18T20:18:48","modified_gmt":"2019-10-18T20:18:48","slug":"poetry-book-review-darwin-a-life-in-poems-by-ruth-padel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.obsessedbynature.com\/blog\/2014\/05\/10\/poetry-book-review-darwin-a-life-in-poems-by-ruth-padel\/","title":{"rendered":"Poetry Book Review: Darwin, A Life in Poems, by Ruth Padel"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Darwin:<\/a>
Darwin: A Life in Poems, by Ruth Padel<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Right, I don’t review poetry books, and I don’t read them that often either, though I have my favourites. But this one is extraordinary. I very nearly read it in one sitting, as Claire Tomalin claims she did on the back cover, but I had to make do with two sittings instead. Gushing newspaper critics often say they couldn’t put a book down. In the case of Padel’s Darwin<\/em>, it was almost true for me.<\/p>\n

Padel is Charles Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter. She heard her grandmother (and Darwin’s biographer) Nora Barlow, aged 95, reminiscing about her<\/em> grandfather. Reading this book, I was in no doubt that Padel, too, could easily have written a prose biography of her ancestor. But I’m very glad she didn’t. What she has achieved in Darwin, A Life in Poems<\/em> is a miracle of conciseness. We say a picture is worth a thousand words: a good poem, more so. With a poet’s and a granddaughter’s sensibility, Padel builds up, step by step, poem by poem, a glittering portrait of the great man. Each moment is encapsulated, seemingly without effort, certainly without a wasted word, in a short poem.<\/p>\n

I read the first one or two, and felt \u2014 they were quite good, and I might soon stop for a cup of tea. I read the next few and the little marginal notes attentively, and started to feel these were rather enjoyable, easy to take in, giving quite a nice picture of the young Darwin in Shrewsbury. I began to reflect on the choice of imagery, how collecting allowed him “to assert control over what’s unbearable.” Unbearable. Collection was about pain? I read a few more. Barmouth: “A child on a beach, alone.” Five lines of the eleven in the poem were a single extended quote from Darwin’s own notes, laid out as verse. Ingenious. Did they scan? Yes, they seemed to have a kind of metre. How subtle were her rhythms? An hour later I was still reading.<\/p>\n

Rhythm, metre, the feel of the words; the choice of topics; the use of materials; the different shapes of the various poems. Many are short, in three-line stanzas: “The forms are themselves. They do not change with the changing light \/ but unfurl in the mind. They swirl and settle new \/ in the kaleidoscope in his head” \u2014 it could be the start of something quite abstract, something about a drug addict or … a visionary. That poem is “The Tiger in Kensington Gardens”, Darwin’s thought wandering to imagining “if a tiger stalked across the plain behind \/ how feeling would be ignited”. It is light as thistledown, compact, dreamy.<\/p>\n

One or two poems are longer: Alfred Russel Wallace’s “Journey up the Sadong River” \u2014 Padel travelled extensively in the East, wrote a nature book, Tigers in Red Weather<\/em> \u2014 has four-line stanzas, more of a plodding rhythm, an earnest self-taught Victorian: it is with a shock I realize the first 27\u00bd lines are a direct quote from Wallace! What a marvellous, virtuoso trick: what confidence as a poet, what insight to feel and to share Wallace’s prose for what it is, at its best: exciting poetry.<\/p>\n

And the pieces fit together to make the puzzle: the wood comes into focus from the individual trees: Darwin the man emerges from the hundred-odd poems. How did she do that? I suppose a prose writer can occasionally get away with a flabby analogy, a woolly opinion, a soggy simile. A poet cannot: certainly not a modern poet, writing short pieces: each must work, or fail utterly.<\/p>\n

I have read a few ‘natural history poems’, some simply bad, some cheerfully zoological, like Walter Garstang’s The Ballad of the Veliger<\/em><\/a> (The Veliger’s a lively tar, the liveliest afloat…<\/em> ), some, like Ted Hughes’s animals, enjoyably insightful. But I’ve never before experienced the life of a naturalist, perhaps the greatest one at that, in a whole book of poems, and it works wonderfully. Darwin, A Life in Poems<\/em> is quite simply a triumph.<\/p>\n

Buy it from Amazon.com<\/a>\u00a0(commission paid)
\nBuy it from Amazon.co.uk<\/a>\u00a0(commission paid)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Right, I don’t review poetry books, and I don’t read them that often either, though I have my favourites. But this one is extraordinary. I very nearly read it in one sitting, as Claire Tomalin claims she did on the back cover, but I had to make do with two sittings instead. Gushing newspaper critics … Continue reading Poetry Book Review: Darwin, A Life in Poems, by Ruth Padel<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[87,90],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","category-natural-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.obsessedbynature.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.obsessedbynature.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.obsessedbynature.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.obsessedbynature.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.obsessedbynature.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=381"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.obsessedbynature.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7170,"href":"https:\/\/www.obsessedbynature.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381\/revisions\/7170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.obsessedbynature.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.obsessedbynature.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.obsessedbynature.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}