Darwin: A Life in Poems
Ruth Padel
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
Poetry |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
160 |
| RRP |
£12.99 |
| Date of Publication |
February 2009 |
| ISBN |
978-0701183851 |
| Publisher |
Chatto & Windus |
| |
Charles Darwin lost his mother at the age of eight, repressed all memory of her, and poured his passion into newt collecting and shooting. As a young man, his five year voyage on H.M.S. Beagle changed his life. Afterwards, working privately on groundbreaking theories about the development of species, he published his geological findings. He also made a nervous proposal to his cousin Emma. They had a very happy marriage but both were painfully aware of the gulf between her devout Christian faith and his increasing religious doubt. The death of three of their ten children accentuated this gulf. For Darwin, death and extinction were nature's way of developing new species: the survival of the fittest. For Emma, death was a prelude to the afterlife. In these extraordinary poems, using multiple viewpoints - even, at one point, the orangutang at London Zoo - Ruth Padel follows the development of Darwin's thought, the drama of the discovery of evolution, and fluctuating emotions in Darwin the husband, the naturalist and the tender father, in a powerful tribute to her famous forbear.
Reviews
The Financial Times
Elizabeth Speller
"Ruth Padel’s stunning sequence of poems is infinitely more than an anniversary keepsake or a tribute to her great-great grandfather, Charles Darwin. It is a unique biography. Teeming with facts and creatures, it builds into an imaginative and dynamic response to a man who changed the way we understand ourselves."
02/02/2009
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The Independent
Peter Forbes
"Padel brings the 19th century to life... Perhaps because he was such a prolific correspondent, Darwin expressed himself so naturally that in several places Padel can make poems by quoting some passages verbatim. Her tone chimes seamlessly with his. That Darwin was a writer of great clarity and no little literary skill makes it fitting that one of the best books celebrating his enormous stature, 200 years on, should be by a poet."
27/02/2009
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The Times
Elaine Feinstein
"...Padel's decision to tell the story of her illustrious ancestor in poems was inspired... Her poems are delicate, but they have an unusual density, too, as she packs her sentences with nouns: “polyps, plankton, jellyfish, and sea-butterflies”... [Darwin] was almost scooped by Alfred Russel Wallace. Padel's subtle account of his exemplary decency as he imagines his life's work overtaken is worthy of a fine novelist."
06/02/2009
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The Spectator
Matt Ridley
"Her poems are biographical, snatches from moments of Darwin’s life, captured with an economy and fluency that prosaic biographers might envy: ‘The origin of man is now proved.’ The animal / in us / has the loudest tunes. ‘Our grandfather is Satan — in the form / of a baboon!’"
28/01/2009
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The New Statesman
Ruth Padel
"...the mix of forceful thought and rhythmic subtlety [in Darwin's writings] is astonishing, and it often shows up Ruth Padel. Much of her book of poems on Darwin is prose in broken lines, and when she quotes his prose, it is better. There are some lovely phrases – “Reticence descends on the house/like an ostrich on its nest: a bell jar of black feathers” – in the best poems, on the death of his daughter Annie: here, the sense of a man who loved and suffered greatly is overwhelming."
09/04/2009
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The Guardian
Richard Holmes
"Padel deploys two specialities - the enjambment, or run-over line (what an amorous fellow bard once memorably called "her famous leg-over line"); and the lurking internal rhyme or half-rhyme. Sometimes these produce immediate, beautiful song-like effects... Yet sometimes - and here's the problem - they lapse into a kind of flattened, jittery, edited prose... At best Padel reveals a unique sense of drama, speed and poetic intensity in what was otherwise a long, sedate and ruminative scientific life."
14/03/2009
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The Scotsman
Doug Johnstone
"It's a strange collection, and occasionally hamstrung by dogged adherence to Darwin's own words, but it's undeniably moving in places, particularly when dealing with his relationships with his wife and children."
31/01/2009
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